Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Abstract

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.

Keywords::

• Scots-Irish
• Ulster-Scots
• Roadside Theater
• On Eagle's Wing
• ethnicity
• legibility
• invention of tradition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1.Jacobson, Roots Too, 6–7.

^2. Ibid., 19.

^3. Ibid.

^4. Ibid., 23.

^5. Ibid., 92.

^6.Rugg, “What it Used to Be,” 45. As Rugg explains, part of the appeal of contemporary musicals such as The Lion King or Wicked is that they re-tell familiar tales; audiences revisit childhood stories in a novel way.

^7. Ibid., 46.

^8. Estimates vary among historians. See Kenny, American Irish, 14; Griffin, People with No Name, 1; Doyle, “Scots Irish or Scotch-Irish,” 151.

^9. One oft-repeated explanation for the nomenclature shift is that, as droves of Irish Catholics arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, Irish Protestants wished to distinguish themselves due to a prejudice against Irish Catholics. See Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 39; Ray, Highland Heritage, 2. Gleeson's rebuttal in “Smaller Differences” is equally important.

^10.Ireland, “Irish Protestant Migration,” 265.

^11. See Quinlan, Strange Kin, 52. Having collected family histories and anecdotes in the American South, I have observed that people can readily reveal their family histories, including what country their ancestors came from, but they identify as “American”, as “Southern”, or as inhabitants of specific locations within certain states. In other words, ethnic ancestry and identity are not as frequently conflated in the American South as they are in urban centres throughout the USA, particularly in the Northeast.

^12. Depending on the particular moment of emigration from Ireland that the casual heritage researcher investigates, any particular Ulster Presbyterian or Ulster-Scot is understood as “Irish”, for unless casual researchers investigate Irish history in full they may miss the instability of the nuanced kinds of identifications explored in this paper.

^13. The 1990 US census revealed that 2.6 million Americans identified as “Scotch-Irish”. In the 2010 census, however, the category “Scots-Irish” was moved to the category “Other” (meaning that not enough people had continued to claim “Scots-Irish” for it to deserve its own line on the census). But, as Kerby Miller explains in “‘Scotch-Irish’, ‘Black Irish’ and ‘Real Irish,’” 141, the majority of “Irish” Americans, particularly those in the South, are very likely to be the descendants of Ulster Presbyterians.

^14. For instance, Highland Brewing Company (based in Asheville, Tennessee) describes itself as “Scots-Irish” but selects normatively Scottish visual and material cultural items like plaids and pipes for branding. Other nominal “Scots-Irish” organisations combine both “Irish” and “Scottish” iconography like the shamrock and the kilt; rarely do I see anything that refers to Ulster, such as the “Red Hand”, which serves as a marker of identity for the Ulster-Irish in the North of Ireland.

^15. The annual Scots-Irish Music Festival in Dandridge, Tennessee, is a celebration of Dandridge and local music traditions as much as it is a celebration of Scots-Irish heritage.

^16. The term “legibility” enjoys a wide currency in linguistics, literature and the social sciences; for the purposes of this paper, however, it is used to mean, in the words of Shannon Stimson, “the need of the state to ‘map’ its terrain and its people”. For a fuller exegesis, see Stimson's review article “Rethinking the State,” particularly 822–3.

^17.Jacobson, Roots Too, 125.

^18. The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, was a political milestone that typically marked the end of the modern “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The Irish and British governments agreed on a number of civil, cultural, judicial, and military policies.

^19. There is a large market for Irish culture and artefacts in the USA. As Diane Negra claims in The Irish in Us, 11, Irishness “increasingly [serves] as the white ethnicity of choice”.

^20.Jacobson, Roots Too, 90.

^21. Anderson likens cheerleaders twirling their batons to the showmanship of Scottish drummers moving their sticks; this finale “shows the fusion” of Scottish, Irish, and American traditions.

^22. This description is found at https://www.facebook.com/RoadsideTheater/info?tab = page_info/ (accessed January 11, 2015). Roadside Theater's mission is similarly described on the theatre's website: “Roadside Theater is dedicated to artistic excellence in pursuit of the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when people and cultures tell their own stories and listen to the unique stories of others.” For more, see http://roadside.org/overview/ (accessed January 11, 2015).

^23. Dudley Cocke and John O'Neal (co-founders of the Free Southern Theater, the theatrical wing of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)) are also co-founders of Alternate ROOTS, an organisation that helps community theatres promoting social justice throughout the South. Roadside Theater has also sustained a twenty-six-year relationship with Native American artists in New Mexico. For instance, Zuni Meets Appalachia, a performance of stories and music presented by the Smithsonian Institution for major venues in New York City, Washington, DC, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is one landmark of this exchange. See http://roadside.org/asset/new-theaters-zunis-idiwanan-chawe/ (accessed January 11, 2015).

^24.Short, Borderline, 40.

^25. Ibid., 2.

^26. Ibid.

^27. Ibid., 39.

^28. Ibid., 2.

^29. Ibid., 3.

^30. Ibid.

^31. Ibid., 4.

^32. Ibid., 8. The lack of a capital “N” in “northern” suggests that the writers and producers either consciously wished to avoid invoking Northern Ireland in this production (and the politics raging in the midst of the Troubles) or that the precise political domain of Northern Ireland was not a concern for them. Either way, this story is not concerned with the contemporary state of the UK and Ireland.

^33. Ibid., 9.

^34. Ibid., 16.

^35. Ibid., 24–5. The factuality of such claims is uncertain; however, the popular image of the Scots-Irish, particularly inhabitants of Appalachia – the “poor white trash” – is that they are semi-literate at best. Perhaps one reason why a Scots-Irish music association flourishes in the contemporary imagination is that “tribal” people are allowed to possess oral cultures but not literary ones.

^36. Ibid., 38.

^37.Borderline, 14–16, includes a folk story of a Scots-Irish man who “took up with” a monstrous “hairy woman”; she eventually tears their child in half, leaving people today to wonder “which half are we?”

^38. For instance, Florence Reece's song “Which Side Are You On?”, which is used in Borderline, refers to coalmines and unions: “They Say in Harlan County / There are no neutrals there / You'll either be a union man / Or a thug for J. H. Blaire”. For more on the Harlan County coal struggles, see John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On?, especially xviii.

^39. Ibid., 2.

^40. Ibid.

^41. Ibid., 41.

^42. Ibid., 3.

^43.Drymon, Scotch-Irish Foodways in America, 13.

^44. Ibid., 14, 41–2.

^45. References to intimate or familial relationships with Native Americans appear frequently in Scots-Irish narratives. This may be due to historical fact (on the frontier lands of early and colonial America, the Scots-Irish often lived in close proximity to Native Americans), or it may be a narrative technique used to suggest that the Scots-Irish are “indigenous” to America. For a historical analysis, see Doan, “How the Irish and Scots Became Indians.”

^46. Paralleling the Scots-Irish admixture of cultures, Puerto Rican identity is similarly composed of mixed “racial” ancestries including, but by no means limited to, Spanish, African, and Taíno.

^47. Here, Roadside Theater advances the idea of multiculturalism and, in doing so, demonstrates some of the problems with the multicultural model: namely, the creators do not address structural racism or white privilege complexly.

^48. A note on the nomenclature: “Pregones” translates to “Questions” and the name “Betsy” has an interesting history in relation to both Scots-Irish and Ulster heritage: Davy Crockett's rifle was famously named “Betsy”; there is a well-attested nineteenth-century American ballad, “Sweet Betsy from Pike”, and in Ulster, Lyttle's novel Betsy Gray, or, The Hearts of Down. A Tale of Ninety-eight (1888; serialised in 1885) celebrates a figure from the 1798 Rebellion.

^49.Short and Cocke, Betsy, 6.

^50. Ibid., 17.

^51. Ibid.

^52. Arguably, Scots-Irish immigration was mostly male. See Doyle, “Scots Irish or Scotch-Irish,” 152.

^53.Short and Cocke, Betsy, 32.

^54. Ibid.

^55.Marquess, “Musical Review: On Eagle's Wing.”

^56.Chrisafis, “Ulster Scots' Eagle Fails to Take Off.”

^57.Dowling's “Confusing Culture and Politics” usefully frames On Eagle's Wing within a very particular political and social context in Northern Ireland. Though both “incoherence” and “illegibility” suggest an inability to be easily read, “incoherence” differs in that it indicates messiness and disorder; in my view, the Scots-Irish narrative in the USA is complex, but not incoherent; it has simply vanished from public view.

^58.Patrick Griffin explains in his book The People with No Name (88–9) that in 1636 one Presbyterian minister attempted to bring his congregation to New England, only to turn around and return to the north of Ireland because of inclement weather. Understandably, because his ship did not land in colonial America, the voyage is not a cultural memory held among Scots-Irish Americans nearly 400 years later. The words “On eagle's wing” however, form part of a verse well known by some churchgoing and religiously oriented Americans; the words come from the book of Isaiah 40: 31: “But those who wait on the Lord / Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, / They shall run and not be wear, / They shall walk and not faint”. The words are also found in Isaac Watts’ eighteenth-century hymn “Why Mournest Thou, My Anxious Soul?” (http://www.hymnary.org/text/why_mournest_thou_my_anxious_soul/ (accessed January 11, 2015)). The point is that, although the words “On eagle's wing” may resonate with religious populations in America, it is unlikely that the title“On Eagle's Wing” evokes many heritage-oriented or ancestral connotations on the American side of the Atlantic. Anecdotally, the two American Presbyterian ministers with whom I spoke (both from the American South) immediately knew the hymn and biblical reference, but neither had anything to say about Irish or Scots-Irish connections, even when asked directly.