Migrancy, Performativity And Autobiographical Identity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

 1. The term ‘the Irish in Britain’ is not unproblematic. Although it is usually used inclusively to refer to all migrants born on the island of Ireland, it nevertheless homogenises a significant number of people, notably those from a Protestant unionist background, who would not consider themselves to be Irish, or at least not only Irish.

 2. See Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self.

 3. Marcus traces the first usage of the term to 1797 in Auto/biographical Discourses, 12.

 4. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 175.

 5. White, ‘“The Refuse of their Own Nation”’, 16, 12.

 6. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.

 7. Smith and Watson, Getting a Life, 15.

 8. Smith and Watson, Getting a Life, 15.

 9. Brewer, ‘Politics and Life Writing’, 722.

10. Murphy, A Whistle in the Dark, 49.

11. Gagnier, Subjectivities, 141.

12. Naughton, On the Pig's Back, 5. Although Naughton eventually realised his literary ambition, he confessed to harbouring a lifelong unease with ‘the mantle of “author”’, regarding himself as ‘a retired coalbagger, on to a good thing with the profitable recreation of writing, and the pleasurable one of reading’ (51–52).

13. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 109.

14. Buckley, ‘“Sitting on Your Politics”’, 119. The silent slippage from ‘Britain’ to ‘England’ here is a familiar, if problematic, feature of much Irish cultural criticism.

15. Bhabha, ‘Between Identities’, 198.

16. Anderson, Autobiography, 125.

17. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 143, original emphasis.

18. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, 213.

19. Kilfeather, ‘Beyond the Pale’, 14–15. Despite her article's subtitle, Kilfeather reads both The Fugitive and The Merry Wanderer as autobiographical texts. She confirms this reading in the headnote to her extract from the latter work in the fifth volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. See Kilfeather, ‘The Profession of Letters, 1700–1810’, 777.

20. Davys, The Works of Mrs Davys, vol. 1, 162–63.

21. See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 11. Eudoxus's remark to Irenius in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland—‘Lord, how quickly doth that country alter men's natures!’—encapsulates the coloniser's anxieties about Ireland's potential to corrupt.

22. Kilfeather, ‘Beyond the Pale’, 25. This strategic identification with the Gaelic Irish can itself be read as teasingly ironic, since as a woman Davys would have known something of their social and political disenfranchisement.

23. See, for example, Campbell, ‘Sounding Out the Margins’; Hickman et al., ‘The Limitations of Whiteness and the Boundaries of Englishness’; Mac an Ghaill and Haywood, ‘Young (Male) Irelanders’; Walter, Outsiders Inside.

24. Barclay, Memoirs and Medleys, 102. Whereas historians such as Lynn Lees and Graham Davis regard Barclay's youthful renunciation of his Irish cultural inheritance as evidence of his assimilative desire, Sean Campbell reinterprets this as part of an evolutionary process of identity formation, an assessment with which I concur. See Campbell, ‘Beyond “Plastic Paddy”’ and Harte, ‘Immigrant Self-fashioning’.

25. Denvir, The Life Story of an Old Rebel, 9.

26. Denvir, The Life Story of an Old Rebel, 1.

27. Foster, The Irish Story, 108.

28. Denvir, The Life Story of an Old Rebel, 2.

29. Keating, My Struggle for Life, viii–ix.

30. Keating, My Struggle for Life, 250.

31. Keating, My Struggle for Life, v.

32. Keating, My Struggle for Life, 4.

33. O'Leary, Immigration and Integration, 132.

34. Keating, My Struggle for Life, 268–69.

35. Gilroy, ‘Diaspora and the Detours of Identity’, 329.

36. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 192–93, original emphasis.

37. Buckley, ‘Imagination's Home’, 24.

38. Buckley, ‘Imagination's Home’, 24.

39. In Cartographies of Diaspora Brah argues that the ‘diaspora space is the site where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native’ (209, original emphasis).

40. O'Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy, 11.

41. O'Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy, 193.

42. O'Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy, 74–75.

43. Hickman et al., ‘The Limitations of Whiteness and the Boundaries of Englishness’, 163.

44. O'Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy, 249, original emphasis.

45. See Harte, ‘“Somewhere beyond England and Ireland”’. For an insightful discussion of the representation of second-generation identities in contemporary fiction and drama, see Arrowsmith, ‘Plastic Paddy’.

46. Walsh, The Falling Angels, 70.

47. Walsh, The Falling Angels, 67.

48. Boyle, Galloway Street, x.

49. Boyle, Galloway Street, x.

50. Boyle, Galloway Street, x.

51. Boyle, Galloway Street, xi.

52. Boyle, Galloway Street, ix.

53. Boyle, Galloway Street, xi.

54. Boyle, Galloway Street, 223.