Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture (review)

Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy and its position as a global consumer make it crucial to examine critically the manifestations of Irishness that are consumed transnationally, as well as within Ireland itself. For instance, in fifteen years, Ireland has moved from criminalizing homosexuality (until 1993) to being a society that professes a vibrant and visible gay community. How much are the various and far-from-homogenous aspects of popular culture conversant with, or resistant to, such changes? This volume tackles these important questions.

Although Diane Negra, one of the contributors to this volume, edited a collection titled The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture in 2006, that volume looked primarily at American consumption of "Irishness." This book is the first sustained analysis of popular culture within Ireland itself. While it necessarily engages with the effects of the importation and exportation of ideas of "Irishness" to and from the United States, Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture deals specifically with these complexities within Ireland. A wealth of popular culture manifestations come under scrutiny: television drama, the Gaelic Athletic Association, boy bands, wedding tourism, Loyalist marches, Colin Farrell, cyberspace, and traditional music. The essays examine "blind spots" in Irish culture in which these concerns are elided and, in doing so, bring into focus the ways in which certain representations of "Irishness" within popular culture sustain or unsettle traditional constructions of nation, the space that "Ireland" occupies, and the types of bodies that are permitted to occupy space in this landscape.

Race is foregrounded throughout. Negra and Gerardine Meaney argue that "Irishness" as a white ethnicity is integral to its popularity and power in an American context; this collection seeks to problematize this association. Among other things, the racial fantasy of Ireland as white cannot be sustained on the home ground, now that it is the destination of migrant communities rather than the source from which exodus occurred. Although on one level, engagements with Ireland's new immigrant community have recently received airspace—for example, the television series Soupy Norman, a Polish soap opera dubbed in English for comedic value—such uses of non-Irish cultural productions often employ the Other culture as a backdrop against which to play out questions of Irish identity, re-silencing the immigrant culture.

The editors have divided the collection into sections titled "Race," "Space," "Diaspora," and "Aporia." The first of these examines the codifications of race within a contemporary Ireland. Cultural engagements with new immigrant communities, and fraught renegotiations concerning notions of national identity, are explored here. Two examples are Maureen Reddy's chapter, "Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann" and Mike Cronin's essay on the GAA. Reddy is generally laudatory of Doyle's attempts to engage with Ireland's changing ethnic background, but she criticizes the extent to which his stories tend to silence the African immigrant of which he writes: "Doyle's own positionality—white, Irish, settled, male and economically secure—cannot be ignored: he is the one ventriloquizing blackness, so to speak." . . . From that perspective, the other remains silent." In contrast to Doyle's engagement, however flawed, Cronin interrogates the advertising campaigns of the GAA, which privilege "an appeal to a national identity that is above all male, white, and physically able." Cronin's assessment of the GAA's conservative negotiation of Irishness charts the extent to which Ireland's construction of its national identity stems from racially exclusionary practices. In this essay and elsewhere, the 2004 Citizenship Referendum looms large.

"Space" looks at a variety of spatial representations of Ireland. Certain spaces, particularly the technological and cyberspace, hold the potential to unsettle. Wanda Balzano and Jefferson Holdridge, for example, find that an exploration of what Dublin's light-rail transport system, LUAS, means to contemporary Dublin offers up a convergence of questions concerning Ireland's economic status, urban spaces, movement across borders, and consumer culture. They point out that the rail system has yet to be explored on...