‘Plastic and Proud’?: Discourses of Authenticity among the second-generation Irish in England. (original) (raw)
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"Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second-generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement. "
Discourses of authenticity and national identity among the Irish diaspora in England.
This thesis explores the ways in which Irish people in England draw on discourses of authenticity in constructing and articulating Irish identities. It is based on the theoretical assumption that identities are constructed through discourse, which is understood as a broad horizon of meaning-making. The Irish in England are discussed as a population that negotiate both their personal identities and putative collective identity within discourses of Irishness as diasporic and as a minority identity within multicultural England. It is argued that 'authenticity' is central to both these positionings, but that personal constructions of authentic Irishness may differ from hegemonic constructions. Additionally, a distinction is made between diasporic and transnational Irish identities. Using a convenience sample, participants who self-identified as Irish were recruited from three English cities. Thirty individual interviews and four group discussions were carried out - the interview schedules and analysis was informed by ongoing 'informal' participant observation. In analysing the corpus of data, narratives of a 'typical' Irish life were attended to as well as the rhetorical means by which Irishness was contested. A clear canonical narrative of a 'collective' Irish experience in post-war England emerges, alongside three major areas of contestation through which claims on authenticity were made: public displays of Irishness, local identities, and generational differences. It is concluded that 'authenticity' is central to understanding how individuals situate their personal identities within collective identities. In particular, three distinct but overlapping discourses of Irish authenticity are identified: authenticity through collective experience and memory; authenticity through transnational knowledge and authenticity through diasporic claim. The implications of these findings, the original contribution they make both to Irish Studies and the social psychological study of identity, and how they may inform future study are also discussed, with an emphasis on the need to further examine the importance of county identity.
BIFFOs, jackeens and Dagenham Yanks: county identity, “authenticity” and the Irish diaspora
Irish Studies Review
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2013.808874 Despite being an everyday point of reference in Irish discourse, the extent to which the county serves as a locus of identification has been oddly overlooked in the Irish studies literature. In particular, the persistence of identification with the county of origin post-migration offers new insights on the construction and maintenance of identity within the Irish diaspora. Drawing on my PhD research on discourses of authenticity and identity among the Irish in England, this article investigates the ways in which county identity is invoked both by Irish migrants and those of Irish descent. It illustrates how the county is used as a rhetorical tool to situate the speaker within discourses of belonging and authenticity, but how this may also act as a constraint on the articulation of a collective, diasporic identity. It argues for a greater research focus on translocalism within the context of changing Ireland–diaspora relations.
Scottish Geographical Journal, 2002
Formal narratives of history are central to the construction of national identities . But diasporic communities are cut off from the representation of an important strand of their histories by a series of absences from spaces of cultural reproduction, in education, memorials and popular culture more widely. The population who experience this disjuncture most sharply are the 'second generation', those whose parents were born and raised in a different culture. At least some aspects of this culture are passed on in the intimate space of child rearing, but at school age most markedly, second-generation children are thrust into a public sphere where this culture is underrepresented or may be missing altogether.
Post-partition anxieties and the matter of authenticity in Ireland
Partitions and Their Afterlives: Violence, Memory, Living - Edited by Radhika Mohanram and Anindya Raychaudhuri https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783488384/Partitions-and-Their-Afterlives-Violence-Memories-Living, 2019
The lead up to the geopolitical partition of Ireland that came with independence from the British Empire in 1921 circulated a concept of ‘Irishness’ that was innately tied to religious and cultural purity. A rhetoric of authenticity was thus borne out in the aftermath of partition. This rhetoric promoted and preserved an ideal of Irishness that stood in contradiction to the tensions of duality manifest in the newly-created Northern Ireland. Issues around national identity and belonging south of the border, while they did not reflect the protracted violent conflict in Northern Ireland, became increasingly relevant, and indeed fraught, with the increase in immigration to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years (1997-2005). These boom years saw over half a million migrants settle in Ireland, many of whom were from previously unrepresented countries and ethnicities. This paper argues that colonial memory and postcolonial categorizations have played a significant role in the emergence of the communities of ‘New Irish’, which is evidenced in the fictional work of a number of contemporary writers, including Roddy Doyle and Ursula Rani Sarma. National anxieties around naming and labeling, around matters of integration and multiculturalism, and fundamentally around citizenship and belonging can all find their origins in Ireland’s partition history.
Landscapes of the Irish Language: Discursive Constructions of Authenticity in the Irish Diaspora
Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies (Special Issue on ‘Irish Otherness’) 16(1): Article 4., 2016
Almost 2 million people in the North and South of Ireland identify as Irish speakers and an estimated 70 million around the globe can claim Irish heritage. While Irish ancestry may be distant for many, the Irish language is active in numerous locations in the diaspora, as documented in research profiling communities across the globe (e.g. Callahan, 1994; Garland 2008; Giles 2016; Kallen 1984, 1994; Noone, 2012a; Ó hEadhra, 1998;Ó Conchubhair 2008; Walsh & NíDhúda 2015 inter alia) and evidenced by the existence of many cultural and language groups. Census figures indicate that at least 25,000 people currently speak the language in Canada, the United States and Australia alone (Statistics Canada, 2013; United States Census Bureau, 2015; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012), yet very few in-depth general accounts of Irish-language use in the diaspora exist. Linguistic practices within Irish communities worldwide vary widely with regard to Irish-language use and language ideologies, with each community subject to distinct concerns, histories and discourses. As such, each has distinct possibilities for creating social and cultural meaning, possibilities that are fundamentally shaped by the socio-cultural and politico-historical contexts within which the Irish language has existed in the last 200 years. This paper investigates how the Irish language is recruited in constructions of cultural authenticity in three sites in the Irish diaspora: Boston, U.S.; Melbourne, Australia; and St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Research is based on open-ended qualitative interviews with 41 learners and speakers regarding the Irish language and their own language practices, and in extensive participant observation of cultural and language-related activities in each site. Thematic content analysis of interview data provides the basis for ethnographic descriptions of each site. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse (e.g. Pennycook, 1994; Foucault, 1981, 1972) affords the identification and delineation of predominant discourses within which Irish-language use is implicated as a meaningful social act, and that are enacted or actively resisted within and across communities, as well as key subject positions made available within these discourses. This approach provides the basis for an exploration of (i) the processes of authenticating a cultural practice within discourse; (ii) how such processes shape the changing configurations of who is included and who is excluded within dominant politico-cultural discourses; and (iii) the various formations of community that exist within and across the diaspora space. The paper shows that the role of the Irish language in authenticating Irish cultural identity is subject to reworkings across time and space, as exemplified in the variety of local meanings it has taken on across the three diaspora sites featured.
The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1: Irish ‘identity’ in the 1980s
Nations and Nationalism, 2007
ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’-based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta-conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.
Contemporary Social Science
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This article examines how national and immigrant identities are discursively constructed through the use of oral histories, using a corpus of 15 oral-history interviews (25 hours of transcribed talk) collected from members of the Irish Association of Manitoba. Using a simplified discoursehistorical approach, the analysis focuses on content, constructive strategies of assimilation and dissimilation, and the linguistic means by which those strategies are achieved, using Wodak et al.'s (1999) framework from an in-depth study of Austrian discourse and identity. While analysis of participants' discourse about identity echoed much of the current theoretical knowledge available about identity -that it is a discursive construction revealed in narratives, that it is provisional and negotiated with others -the analysis also showed that for specific subgroups such as immigrants, identity construction is context-dependent, particularly for diasporic groups.