Texts and textures of Irish America (original) (raw)
Texts and textures of Irish America
Catherine B. Shannon
To cite this article: Catherine B. Shannon (2015) Texts and textures of Irish America, Irish Studies Review, 23:2, 125-127, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2015.1019729
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2015.1019729
Published online: 27 Mar 2015.
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PREFACE
Texts and textures of Irish America
Catherine B. Shannon*
Department of History, Westfield State University, Westfield, Massachusetts, USA
It is approximately fifty years since the Irish American experience began to attract significant attention from academics and social commentators. In the 1960s and early 1970s, William Shannon, Thomas Brown, Lawrence McCaffrey, and Dennis Clark published pioneering works 1{ }^{1} that moved beyond the ethno-pietistic interpretations that had characterised earlier works on the Irish in America, such as James Bernard Cullen’s account of the Irish in Boston and the publications of the New York based American Irish Historical Society. The pioneering studies of the 1960s and 1970s authors were primarily political; they concentrated on the rise of Catholic Irish Americans in urban politics and the supportive roles that Irish American activists played in advancing Ireland’s national cause in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. 2{ }^{2}
At that time, considerable attention was directed also to the dominance of the Irish within the American Catholic Church and especially its monopoly of the American Catholic hierarchy. The perception of Irish America that emerged from the aforementioned studies was one of a constituency that was primarily urban in location, working class in values, Catholic in religion, Democratic in political party affiliation, and devoted to the cause of Irish independence. To a great extent, this was a homogenised view of Irish America, which, although it is generally recognised as still valid today, tended to occlude a cohort of Irish Americans that expressed different self-identities and underwent different experiences than those perceived to be the ones who qualified for the label of “Irish American”.
Building on the foundation that those works from the 1960s and 1970s established, over the past thirty years a new generation of scholars has shown that Irish American identity and experiences, influenced greatly by factors such as class, gender, religious affiliation, and period of immigration, were more complex and varied than was previously proposed. Many of the Irish who emigrated before the Great Famine, for instance, claimed different allegiances than those who came during and after it. Also significant were the provinces where immigrants had resided before they left Ireland; most Catholics, for instance, hailed from Leinster, Connaught and Munster, whereas most Presbyterians came from Ulster. These realities made a difference in terms of post-immigration experiences; so, too, did settlement communities in America; Boston’s Irish were not the same as Butte’s; likewise, Charleston’s immigrants differed from San Francisco’s, etc.
This issue of Irish Studies Review had its genesis in two sessions offered by the New England Conference for Irish Studies at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, in the autumn of 2012. Suggesting considerable deviation on previous understandings of Irish
- *Email: cbs38@aol.com ↩︎
American identity and assimilation, the panellists - who are also the contributors to this issue - analysed a variety of texts in terms of what they revealed about authors of Irish American texts, their expressions of self-identity, their degrees of assimilation, and more. Having chaired those sessions, I particularly welcome these articles, all of which are the finished products that evolved from those tentative convivial discussions.
The introduction and the seven essays in this issue reflect the ongoing vibrancy, sophistication and breadth of scholarly analysis occurring currently on the variegated constituents of Irish American history and culture. An interdisciplinary approach can be detected within and among the essays; their interweaving of historical, cultural, literary and anthropological analyses illuminates how Irish immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants constructed new Irish American identities, resisted and overturned negative stereotypes associated with the Irish of the Famine era, and often created transatlantic Irish identities. In the case of the contemporary “Scots-Irish” in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, it appears that they have invented an identity that has little relevance to their putative “Scots-Irish” (or “Ulster Scots”) counterparts in Ulster. By examining the evolution of these new identities over time and space, the essays underscore the complexities of what it means to be Irish American, especially in terms of the processes, strategies and degrees of assimilation that brought the Irish into the broader folds of American society.
The contributors have been innovative in exploring a broad array of hitherto neglected source materials that shed light on the nature and variety of Irish American identities. These range from the highly literary genre of a Henry James short story to the didactic nationalist fiction of a Fenian veteran. Included, too, is scholarship directed to the “lowbrow” penny dreadful pulp fiction of Max Brand, Ray Chandler and others. The latter invented heroes for an increasingly literate readership of first- and second-generation Irish Americans. The essays on the types of music and drama that were created by and for people of Irish descent in places as diverse as Charleston and New York provide insights into how new identities and degrees of respectability were negotiated over time and space. It is also worth noting that the texts analysed here represent a long chronological era that extends from famine times to the turbulent era of the Fenians and Home Rule. They include contemporary musical productions that speak to the nature of “Scotch Irish” identity in Kentucky and Tennessee, and they conclude with an assessment of folklore’s role in providing textual models and strategies that resurface, albeit in different forms, over time. The attention given to the Ulster Irish and their descendants is particularly welcome because their story has not received as much attention as that of Irish Americans connected with the flood of immigrants who came between 1845 and 1900 .
Of equal salience is the fact that many of the textual materials under consideration in this issue were produced by authors from different socio-economic levels of Irish Americans; they range from highly educated figures like Bishop John Fitzpatrick and Henry James to the creators of pulp fiction and the composers of sentimental songs and stories associated with minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. Thus the reader is provided with insights into Irish American identity, or lack thereof, at different class levels. In addition to providing a more complicated account of those who can be included as constituents of Irish America, this collection suggests the value of engaging with new and non-traditional source materials for an enriched understanding of the Irish American experience. The editor, E. Moore Quinn, and her contributors have produced a collection that is innovative and interesting and promises to inspire new discussion, questions and research about Irish America.
Notes
- For more, see Shannon, American Irish; Brown, Irish American Nationalism; McCaffrey, Irish Diaspora; Clark, Irish in Philadelphia. McCaffrey’s more recent classic, Textures of Irish America, is invaluable for its comprehensive bibliographical essay on the evolving scholarship on Irish America over the past forty years.
- I drew on much of this new scholarship while preparing my article “‘With Good Will.’” See especially 3−293-29.
Bibliography
Brown, Thomas N. Irish American Nationalism, 1870-1890. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
Clark, Dennis. The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973.
McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Diaspora in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
McCaffrey, Lawrence. Textures of Irish America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
Shannon, Catherine B. “‘With Good Will Doing Service’: The Charitable Irish Society of Boston, 1737-1857.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 43, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 94-123.
Shannon, William V. The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait. New York: Macmillan, 1963.