Irish Global Migration and Memory

Transatlantic Perspectives of Ireland's Famine Exodus

Marguerite Corporaal, Jason King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315530796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Irish Global Migration and Memory: Transnational Perspectives of Ireland's Famine Exodus brings together leading scholars in the field who examine the experiences and recollections of Irish emigrants who fled from their famine-stricken homeland in the mid-nineteenth century. The book breaks new ground in its comparative, transnational approach and singular focus on the dynamics of cultural remembrance of one migrant group, the Famine Irish and their descendants, in multiple Atlantic and Pacific settings. Its authors comparatively examine the collective experiences of the Famine Irish in terms of their community and institution building; cultural, ethnic, and racial encounters with members of other groups; and especially their patterns of mass-migration, integration, and remembrance of their traumatic upheaval by their descendants and host societies. The disruptive impact of their mass-arrival had reverberations around the Atlantic world. As an early refugee movement, migrant community, and ethnic minority, Irish Famine emigrants experienced and were recollected to have faced many of the challenges that confronted later immigrant groups in their destinations of settlement. This book is especially topical and will be of interest not only to Irish, migration, and refugee scholars, but also the general public and all who seek to gain insight into one of Europe's foundational moments of forced migration that prefigures its current refugee crisis.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

Irish global migration and memory: transnational perspectives of Ireland’s Famine exodus

Marguérite Corporaal and Jason King

This introduction to the special issue explains how the intersections between memory, diaspora, and identity formation are addressed in six articles which focus on the Irish Famine diaspora around the Atlantic and the Pacific rim. It argues for a comparative, transnational approach toward the collective experiences of the Famine Irish in terms of their community and institution building; cultural, ethnic, and racial encounters with members of other groups; and especially their patterns of mass migration, integration, and remembrance of their traumatic upheaval by their descendants and host societies.

In what ways are memories of fateful events in the homeland reconfigured by emigrant communities and their descendants? Can one speak of a shared cultural legacy with cultural groups in the mother country because migrants have “transnational affiliations?”¹ Do they participate in what Thomas Faist calls transnational spaces which may “result in the formation of a common culture […] shared by both immigrants and natives?”² Or, bearing in mind Andreas Huyssen’s claim that a diasporic community’s “tenuous and often threatened status within the majority culture” may result in a nostalgic idealization of the country of origin,³ should one think in terms of specific diaspora forms of cultural recollection that are marked by particular traits, turns, and transitions?⁴ Furthermore, in what ways are changes in the social status of the migrant community translated into shifts in the cultural memory that is related to the former homeland? As Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have persuasively argued, when “migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them,” these “are transferred and brought into new social constellations and political contexts.”⁵ Does this relocation of legacies of the past to other geographical and sociocultural settings lead to dynamic transfers – that Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory” – between the mnemonic traditions of the homeland and the cultural remembrance of the receiving nation, in interactive forms?⁶

These significant issues have recently been addressed by scholars analyzing Atlantic and Pacific diaspora cultures. The six essays in this special issue likewise engage the intersections between cultural remembrance, migration, and identity formation. They explore the transmission of formative cultural memories of the mother country by emigrants to their host societies and the ways in which these homeland recollections become integrated and inscribed with the cultural legacies of the country of settlement as well as other diaspora communities. Moreover, the articles discuss the longue durée repercussions of these cultural recollections of the country of origin that were transported to new worlds by emigrants, investigating how the past of a specific diaspora culture is commemorated until the present day and what role the diaspora plays in homeland reconstructions of an experience that involved massive emigration.

The contributions to this issue examine these questions by focusing on the cultural legacies that were transferred across the Atlantic and the Pacific by one of the most substantial diasporas of the nineteenth century: the exodus of the Irish Famine generation, and the collective memories of their descendants. There has recently been a proliferation of studies of the Irish Atlantic as a distinct area of research in its own right. The sheer difficulty of defining the “Irish Atlantic” and framing the spatial and temporal research parameters for its study is indicated by the titles of some of the most influential works in the field: Kevin Whelan’s “The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Long Eighteenth Century” (2004), Peter O’Neill and David Lloyd’s The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-currents of the African and Irish Diaspora (2009), and David Gleeson’s The Irish in the Atlantic World (2010).⁷ Each of these edited collections and studies have been groundbreaking in seeking to expand the disciplinary and geographical boundaries and binational trajectories of Irish migration and diaspora research.

This special issue not only builds on this work, but also takes novel directions in its comparative, transnational approach and singular focus on the dynamics of cultural remembrance of one migrant group, the Famine Irish and their descendants, in multiple Atlantic and Pacific settings. In an apt overview of new work in the field, Christopher Cusack, who contributes to this special issue, not only acknowledges the scope of recent research on the Irish diaspora, but he also suggests that it tends to emphasize the issues of “race and slavery.”⁸ More broadly, this special issue seeks to explore the global currents of the Irish Famine migration across the Atlantic and Pacific rims, and to comparatively examine the collective experiences of the Famine Irish in terms of their community and institution building; cultural, ethnic, and racial encounters with members of other groups; and especially their patterns of mass migration, integration, and remembrance of their traumatic upheaval by their descendants and host societies. The disruptive impact of their mass-arrival had reverberations around the Atlantic world. As an early refugee movement, migrant community, and ethnic minority, Irish Famine emigrants experienced and were recollected to have faced many of the challenges that confronted later immigrant groups in their destinations of settlement.

Thus, the emphasis here is on the Famine Irish because they are both historical agents of traumatic mass migration and iconic “figures of memory.”⁹ In a speech delivered at the dinner of the St. Patrick’s Society, Toronto, on 17 March 1860, William Halley called the Irish the “Ishmaelites of the earth – wanderers everywhere – discovered ‘quite at home’ under the burning sun of the tropics – happy in the frozen regions of the globe.” Wondering where “the ‘exiles’ have not penetrated,”¹⁰ Halley examines the massive outflow of Irish men and women during the Great Hunger and its immediate aftermath. Ireland’s An Gorta Mór (1845–1852) – a period of mass starvation – caused by a wide-scale potato pestilence and resulting in the eviction of numerous impoverished tenants which exacerbated tense relationships between the country and the imperial London Government¹¹ – led to a dramatic exodus of emigrants. These, as novelist Thomas O’Neill Russell suggested in 1860, were “flying away from the beautous isle as though it were the hot-bed, the birth-place of some cursed plague that fastened with deadly gripe upon its victims.”¹²

From the Green Atlantic to the Green Pacific

Whereas prior to the Famine, multitudes of Irish, especially from Ulster, had departed to countries such as England, Canada, and the USA,¹³ emigration levels reached their peak during and in the immediate aftermath of the Famine. The Cork Examiner of 29 December 1847 reported the “thousand of these unhappy people” daily gathering in the port of Queenstown (Cobh) to escape the distress of hunger and poverty, and The Illustrated London News of 10 May 1851 emphasized the dramatic depopulation of Ireland with an annual exodus of emigrants “proceeding to an extent altogether unprecedented.” Irish Famine emigrants traveled as far as Australia and Southern America in their quest for new homes but most settled in Britain, Canada, and the USA. Many Irish emigrants of the poorest class could not afford the passage to transatlantic areas and therefore settled in English cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, and London.¹⁴ As a result, England, Scotland, and Wales counted 727,000 Irish-born citizens in the 1851 census – an increase of 608,000 in comparison to the 1841 population survey.¹⁵ Most Irish Famine emigrants, however, moved to North America. As The Illustrated London News wrote on 6 July 1850, “the Irish emigration flows with full force upon the United States” where, according to rough estimations, between 1846 and 1855 1,442,000 Irish men and women alighted.¹⁶ In the same period, approximately 300,000 Irish set up new homes in the British and French Canadian territories,¹⁷ especially in New Brunswick, Upper Canada, Quebec City, or Montreal.¹⁸ Moreover, half of the Irish emigrants who had initially settled in Southern American countries such as Argentina and Uruguay soon relocated to the USA.¹⁹

By contrast, the percentage of Irish who settled in Australia and New Zealand during the Famine years was relatively low, primarily because the journey to these countries was too complex and too expensive. Young women were among the largest group of Irish immigrants to Australia: as Malcolm Campbell’s study Ireland’s New Worlds shows, between 1848 and 1850, 4175 orphan girls were provided with a passage to Australia by charitable institutions and the workhouses responsible for their maintenance.²⁰ The public remembrance of these female migrants was long overshadowed by Irish political exiles and Young Ireland leaders transported during the Famine and after the failed 1848 rebellion, such as William Smith O’Brien, John Martin, Kevin O’Doherty, Terence Bellew McManus, Thomas Francis Meagher, and especially John Mitchel, whose perceptions of colonial and racial difference in the Pacific is here explored by Peter O’Neill. Although the orphan girls were few in number, their global migration has provided an object of commemoration in recent years. As Emily Mark-FitzGerald’s article in this issue notes, their initial landing place at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney has become the site for the controversial Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine (1999), which “subtly suggests the partiality of memory, and the fraught relationship between Famine sufferers, their recipient communities, and the contemporary viewing subject.”

The vast majority of the Irish orphan girls adapted quickly and immediately found employment in Australian households, but a small group of them, particularly those from the Belfast union, were “described as being of ‘abandoned’ and ‘disreputable’ character, and whose immoral behaviour had been a by-word during the journey.”²¹ They were alleged to be “filthy brutes” and “public women”²² who sexually fraternized with the crews, became pregnant, had abortions, and occupied brothels in Australia, though few of these scurrilous rumors have been substantiated. The plight of orphan girls cast half way around the world from their familia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Irish global migration and memory: transnational perspectives of Ireland’s Famine exodus
• 2. Memory and John Mitchel’s appropriation of the slave narrative
• 3. Recrimination and reconciliation: Great Famine memory in Liverpool and Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century
• 4. Remembering Canada: the place of Canada in the memorializing of the Great Irish Famine
• 5. “Neither do these tenants or their children emigrate”: famine and transatlantic emigration from Finland in the nineteenth century
• 6. Famine, home, and transatlantic politics in two late nineteenth-century Irish-American novels
• 7. Famine memory and the gathering of stones: genealogies of belonging
• Index