"Other People's Diasporas": Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture by Sinéad Moynihan (review)

In Roddy Doyle's 2007 short story "Home to Harlem" (titled after Claude McKay's novel of the same name), a young mixed-race Irishman named Declan O'Connor, following his interest in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, journeys to New York in a quest to find information on his black grandfather, only to encounter the vexations of his "overlapping, and seemingly incongruous, racial and national subject positions": "In Dublin, Declan is Irish but not white. In New York, Declan is black but not African American." Conversely, in Eugene Brady's 1998 film The Nephew, Chad Egan-Washington, a young mixed-race New Yorker, travels to Ireland to disperse his mother's ashes in the village of her birth. Chad is at once a black cultural interloper and a returning native son—a disjunctive doubling that raises provocative questions about the relationship between Irish emigration and immigration, and about the relationship of such crossings and double-crossings to the meaning of "Irish" as both a national and a racial and ethnic designation.

Sinéad Moynihan's "Other People's Diasporas" plunges the reader into the vexed cultural geography suggested in these two examples. It does so largely by demonstrating just how contentious this territory is, and by critiquing some of the ideological formulations that have been deployed to simplify the project of mapping its complex and shifting contours. As Moynihan's title suggests, the most powerful of these ideological formations, and the one that primarily concerns her, is the construction of "Irishness" as a transnational and postcolonial value expressed through narratives of diaspora and dispossession and rhetorically reinforced by an analogy with history of Africans in the New World, and in the United States in particular.

This analogy has been with us for some time now, probably finding its most succinct and popularized expression in Roddy Doyle's 1987 novel The Commitments (and more especially in the popular film version of the novel), in which would-be impresario Jimmy Rabitte lays claim to American soul music on the theory that the Irish are to Europe what blacks are to America. The power and appeal of this analogy is undeniable, so much so that it has paradoxically served the promotion of the national brand; these very associations with marginality and oppression have "rendered Irishness 'sexy' in the contemporary moment," functioning as sort of a postcolonial adjunct of the Riverdance effect. However, Moynihan finds this black / Irish move "undermined by the fact that such parallels . . . serve to bolster a sense of Irish victim-hood—and, by extension, white innocence—in the contemporary moment," a "moment" in which, as Moynihan notes elsewhere in the book, the status of newly diasporic Africans within the Irish polity is a matter of intense concern and debate.

The issue, as Moynihan notes, is that the understanding of "black" in this discourse is not pan-African or even transatlantic broadly speaking, but specifically African-American, fruit of the fact that the "diasporic" component of modern Irish identity is to a great extent an effect of the crossings and re-crossings between Ireland and the United States over the last two centuries. As a result, "Irish attitudes toward race have been so profoundly influenced by American racial ideologies (and Irish emigrant experiences within those ideologies) that it is virtually impossible to separate the two"; more specifically and recently, "issues of race and immigration in contemporary Ireland are increasingly being mediated through an American lens or displaced to an American context."

The principal thrust in "Other People's Diasporas" is to examine how cultural production from the late 1980s up through the present moment reflects and engages this ever-present legacy, as discourse about "Irishness" is torn between the increasing awareness of such complications on the one hand and the attempt to stabilize or consolidate a national or cultural brand in the context of globalization on the other. All...