Race in Irish Literature and Culture

Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, and race as they emerge in climate change discourse and contemporary culture. He is the editor of A History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Julie McCormick Weng is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University. She coedited Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019) and currently serves as Secretary of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Introduction: the racial imaginaries of Irish literature and culture Malcolm Sen and Julie McCormick Weng; 1. 'Our heroic ancestors': antiquarian literature and the discourse of racial heritage Clare O'Halloran; 2. Racializing Irish historical consciousness Guy Beiner and Oded Y. Steinberg; 3. Race, minstrelsy, and the Irish stage: the origins and afterlives of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon Patrick Lonergan; 4. Race and Irish women's novels in the long nineteenth century Matthew L. Reznicek; 5. Blackface minstrelsy, Irish modernism, and the histories of Irish whiteness John Brannigan; 6. Joyce's racial comedy Vicki Mahaffey; 7. W. B. Yeats, the Irish free state, and the rhetoric of race suicide Julie McCormick Weng; 8. 'Ulster's white negroes': rhetoric of race at the start of the troubles Simon Prince; 9. Learning from Walcott: Heaney's black and green Atlantic Richard Rankin Russell; 10. Race, Irishness, and popular culture in Australia Dianne Hall; 11. White nationalism and Irish America: a cultural history told through works by James T. Farrell and Eugene O'Neill Peter D. O'Neill; 12. Diasporic afterlives: an Irish-Jewish archive for Ruth Gilligan's Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan Stephen Watt; 13. 'Dubh': poets of color and new Irish poetry Ailbhe McDaid; 14. Split selves and double consciousness in recent Irish fiction Oona Frawley; 15. Race, place, and the grounds of Irish geopolitics Shirley Lau Wong.