Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity

Celtic Soul Brothers

Lauren Onkey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135165703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia irlandesa

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed - and thereby created - a "black" identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O'Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

1
Introduction

“Aren’t We a Little White for That Kind of Thing?”

When Roddy Doyle’s youthful, irreverent, insightfully class-conscious novel The Commitments was published in the United States in 1988, it felt like a new but familiar voice in Irish literature. It was perhaps the first Irish novel I read in which I felt such strong cultural affinities between the United States and Ireland. This is of course because of the soul music The Commitments play. The music plot of the novel—the band casts off playing post-New Wave music in favor of soul—was a revelation. Doyle manages to simultaneously reawaken the tenacious and complex analogy between the Irish and African Americans and render it slightly absurd. If a reader has ever seen a nineteenth-century Thomas Nast or Punch cartoon depicting the Irish or Irish immigrants as apes, or remembers the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association singing “We Shall Overcome” at marches and protests in the late 1960s, The Commitments was somehow both the same old song and a brand new thing.

But none of the characters in the novel sees these connections, which is part of its brilliance. Jimmy Rabbitte, the band’s huckster manager, pedals the argument that “Irish are the niggers of Europe” without any accompanying political convictions. The mixed response of his band—some don’t really understand the comparison, and none of them see it without Jimmy’s encouragement—also reveals the potential absurdity of it, as it ignores the ways the Irish considered themselves—and were considered by others—as unequivocally white, especially in America, even if they felt ignored as they expressed their disaffection and exclusion from the country’s centers of power. The novel provocatively signifies on how racial discourse has been used to define Irishness. It seemed all the more relevant when the novel reached American readers in 1988, the same year that Irish rock giant U2 released the film Rattle and Hum, which follows the band’s exploration of African-American music and the musicians’ somewhat suspect discovery of their Irish blackness. At the same time, the emergence of whiteness studies in the early 1990s generated new and productive ideas about the Irish and racial discourse. These events suggested a new dialogue was opening up, that the black-Irish trope was at work again, in perhaps more complex ways than ever, and that there were new histories emerging that might change how the meaning of Irishness could be understood with regard to African Americans in the United States. I hoped that the accessibility and popularity of The Commitments could open up classroom dialogue on Ireland, Irish-America, and race in the classroom in exciting ways.

Except my students just didn’t buy it. In east central Indiana where I was teaching, a region without a significant Irish-American population—unlike the Northeast or Chicago—and with little sense of Irish-American history, students have never considered Irish people anything other than white. They take offense at the novel’s use of the word “nigger” and initially see any comparison between Irish and African Americans as ludicrous. They point out important distinctions between oppression and slavery. They argue that although Irish Americans endured horrible conditions in the nineteenth century, they do not live under them now, while African Americans still face serious discrimination, and had no right to vote in some parts of the United States as recently as the 1960s. The students echo saxophone player Dean Fay in the 1991 film version of the novel, when he responds to James Brown’s incendiary 1964 performance of “Please, Please, Please” on The T.A.M.I. Show by saying “em, aren’t we a little white for that kind of thing?” The tenacity of the Irish/African-American comparison, the relationship and contradictions between the use of the comparison in Ireland, and its breakdown in America exemplified by my students’ response, is the central focus of this study.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined relationships between the Irish and African Americans since the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that one of the most persistent tropes of Irish and Irish-American identity formation is a comparison between Irish and African-American experiences of oppression; as it traverses the Atlantic, this trope oscillates between identification and loathing. In Ireland, blackness becomes a foil for the Irish to express their experience of colonial oppression, to define a transatlantic antiracist, anticolonial identity. In the United States, however, blackness becomes a negative foil, used by Irish Americans to distance themselves from African Americans in order to assimilate into mainstream white American society. But both Irish identification with African Americans and Irish-American resistance to the comparison use blackness as a tool to define Irishness in often remarkably similar ways. I reveal the trope’s tenacity as it continually reemerges as a way for writers, musicians, and political activists to make sense of the Irish and Irish immigrant experience in texts from both Ireland and the United States in multiple genres and different eras: the work of novelists Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; journalist/poet/novelist John Boyle O’Reilly; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; memoirist Michael Patrick McDonald; and rock musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

These texts demand a careful and flexible understanding of the relationship between Ireland and America. In a 1993 essay on Irish youth culture’s identification with people of color, Fintan O’Toole asks, “How did [Ireland] get … from the idea of national cultural distinctiveness to the desire not just to be somebody else, but to be a different race, and an oppressed one at that?” (“Going Native” 19). Partially, he attributes this desire for otherness to the Irish development of “a confidently urban self-image in the 1980s” (28) that required “a device which frees it from the burden of identity and lets it loose to play games with the world” (30), especially American popular culture: “For writers who grew up with Hollywood westerns and black-inspired rock and roll music, Indians and blacks were available images that had both the texture of contemporary pop culture and an ironic subconscious prehistory in the most useful aspects of the Irish past, the Irish past that happened in America” (29). O’Toole’s account of the attraction of Irish Americans to African Americans takes us to Ireland’s relationship with America, and to consider the meaning of the trope in both places. And in “the Irish past that happened in America,” the laughs of The Commitments fade out. Irish-American and African-American relationships are fraught with conflict yet contain a strong identification, one that hits a sensitive nerve in Irish-American culture.

In creating a dialogue between Irish and Irish-American engagement with blackness, I reveal productive contradictions that challenge how African Americans have been represented in Irish and Irish-American popular culture. While using blackness to define Irishness can be transformative, doing so can obscure the white privilege that Irish Americans historically exercised over African Americans in a haze of romantic racialism. Colonialism does not give the Irish license to ignore the history of white appropriation of blackness. While radical, creative Irish thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic have seen an affinity with blacks as an alternative to limiting definitions of Irishness, such affinities always risk reinscribing African Americans as safe, perennial sufferers. More importantly, these affinities can imply that African Americans are interesting only insofar as they serve to revitalize the Irish. Unless we address both the Irish and the Irish-American representations of blackness, the political claims of what I call the “Celtic soul brothers” will fail. Irish use of blackness must engage with white privilege and the transatlantic circulation of the meaning of blackness in order to radicalize Irishness.

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The Irish and Irish-Americans in this study who make positive alliances with African Americans attempt to create notions of identity that transcend national or continental boundaries. Critics have called our attention to the complicated nexus of politically progressive alliance and romantically racist paternalism. Liz Cullingford describes such identification with nonwhite peoples as a means of creating “an alternative and exotic Self.” At best such “imaginative connections” can “destabilize essentialist conceptions of national identity, and to energize political action…. they operate, as does most popular culture, through the power of empathy, which can be a potent mobilizing force. For artists, the creative freedom to seek parallels that cross ethnic or temporal boundaries increases the potential range and complexity of literary or cinematic metaphors” (133). These creative analogies can invigorate and reshuffle the terms by which Irishness is defined and imagined. Most importantly, as Steve Garner argues, they infuse the degraded terms of “blackness” or “Irishness” with “positivity” (71). Garner explains that the analogy is based on “perceived levels of civilization”: “The principal idea is that a technologically and militarily superior culture assumed that it was also morally superior, and looked at others through the prism of its own value system” (71). By appropriating a black identity for Irish people, the African-American/Irish analogy challenges a colonial ideology that degrades both Irish and black culture. It makes sense as a strategy from the Irish point of view, especially when we consider the ways that African-American culture circulates around the Atlantic through images of noble suffering and inspirational freedom. Luke Gibbons explores “the free play of hybridity and cultural mixing” (Transformations in Irish Culture 172) of recent Irish identifications with African Americans and Native Americans as well as reclamations of similarly hybrid moments in the past, like the alliance forged between Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell and the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. But rather than focus on the hybridity of margin and center, colonized and colonizer, Gibbons values hybrids that seek alternative connections: “‘lateral’ journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide…. Hybridity need not always take the high road: where there are borders to be crossed, unapproved roads might prove more beneficial in the long run than those patrolled by global powers” (180). Looking for connections to African Americans is a way to build one of these unapproved roads, to reject the impulse to mimic the English colonial center and search out other models of accounting for the experience of colonialism.

But these desires for new categories and images resonate differently in the United States, where relations between Irish Americans and African Americans are real, not theoretical, and historically fraught with racism and violence. As Cullingford points out, “What looks from a postcolonial Irish perspective like a sympathetic and intellectually coherent identification with the descendants of slaves may appear to an American Black as shameless appropriation” (7). Yet we cannot separate this American context from our understanding of the Irish-black trope: it is constitutive of it. Mass Irish emigration to the United States since the mid-nineteenth century has absorbed America into notions of Irish identity. The circulation of African-American popular culture in Ireland, from minstrel shows to blues package tours, has offered attractive ways to express suffering and freedom. I chose the subtitle Celtic Soul Brothers, then, because it embodies the intricacies of Irish-black affinities; it captures the lateral hybridities and unapproved roads of transatlantic identity while at the same time marking their limits. “Celtic Soul Brothers” mixes the transnational “celtic” with the pan-African, anticolonial U.S. Black Power moniker “soul brother.”¹ But the term is also dangerously utopian, obfuscating the pitfalls of the Irish claim to an antiracist identity based on shared experience. Many black “soul brothers” in American streets saw Irish Americans as symbols of racist authority. Given Irish-America’s history of violence against African Americans, from the New York City draft riots to the Boston busing protests, “celtic soul brothers” can seem like a bad joke. So while the road may be unapproved, it’s more often than not a one-way street. While there have been flickers of dialogue when African Americans looked to the Irish as models—most famously, during the Harlem Renaissance—there is not a parallel trope of African Americans comparing themselves to the Irish, one indication of how much the Irish were associated with anti-African American sentiments in the United States.²

The term is also useful because it marks the masculine terms of the Irish-black trope explored in this study—these are, indeed, Celtic soul brothers. With the significant exception of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’s political work, all of the works analyzed here are male authored. They reveal rich connections between Irish-American identity and vulnerable or beleaguered masculinity. This is especially true for James Farrell, Jimmy Breslin, and Tom Hayden, who examine an explicit and usually toxic relationship between Irish-American manhood and antiblack racism. And for the artists in this study who express solidarity with African Americans, the alliance often allows for an openly emotional and vulnerable expression of self that recasts Irish-American male identity. However, although the Irish artists that I study are all male, they do not make the same links in their work between feelings of affinity for African-Americans and expressions of masculinity. There are certainly connections between desire for black expressive license and male sexuality, but I would argue that gender is not the primary register of such expression for Van Morrison, U2, and Roddy Doyle. Because of this difference between Irish-American and Irish expressions of masculinity vis-à-vis African Americans, I do not use gender as an organizing principle for my study. As I note later, Eric Lott, Kevin Kenny, and Brownwen Walter have laid the foundation for further work in this area.

The roots of the Irish/African-American connection are tangled, disputed, and recursive. Visual representations of the Irish as nonwhite is a useful starting point, not as the Genesis story of a linear narrative, but of the long life and conflicted meanings of such imagery. In the wake of L. P. Curtis’s analysis of the representation of the Irish in Victorian caricature, Apes and Angels (1971), much has been made of the cartoon representations of the Irish as simian. As anthropology developed powerful cultural purchase in the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish were represented often in English cartoons as a race of blacks. According to Curtis, the images first appeared in the 1840s and persisted through the 1880s but were at their most active from the 1850s to the 1870s. In the images that Curtis collects from Punch and other English magazines, the Irish were drawn as ape-like figures with tousled dark hair, protruding lips, large square foreheads and long, dangling arms—a threat to England and to the feminine figure of Hibernia. These caricatures were echoed in the United States as well, especially in the work of Thomas Nast. The fact that this trope translated so easily to the United States shows the parallels between colonial and U.S. attitudes toward blacks and also reveals the complexity of racial hierarchies in the United States. Curtis shows how the increasing faith placed in physiognomy in England was put to use to explain and denigrate Irish behavior, thus reinforcing long held prejudices “by providing a scientific basis for assuming that such characteristics as violence, poverty, improvidence, political volatility, and drunkenness were inherently Irish and only Irish” (21).

Characterizations of the Irish became more “bestial and simian” after the Irish began to emigrate to England in large numbers during and after the famine as well as during periods of Irish political unrest when nationalist groups rose up against English rule. The process of simianization

turned the face of Irishmen (and dragons or reptiles) into a hybrid creature with facial features akin to those of anthropoid apes, while a prognathous mouth or jaw conveyed images of primitive and brutish men, who had clearly degenerated but had not yet fallen into the anthopoidal abyss of gorillas or chimpanzees. In the vocabulary of English caricature, mid-facial prognathism signified the primitive or degenerate nature of not only Irish peasants but also violent criminals and subversive types in Great Britain. But when the bulbous mouth and upper lip coincided with a sloping forehead, snub nose, pointed ear, fanglike teeth, and receding jaw, then the face devolved into the distinctive shape of the simianized Fenian, whose fierce and feral features betrayed his sadistic love of violence. (121)

The representations constructed Irish resistance to English rule as uncivilized braying, rendering such resistance illegitimate and marking clear boundaries between the English and the Irish.³

Apes and Angels created much controversy. Critics of Curtis often fell into a binary debate over whether or not the Irish were actually considered biologically nonwhite. Kevin Kenny contends that because Apes and Angels implied that race was the only way in which the Irish were perceived, it was “partial and misleading,” and cautions that “it ought not to be treated as though it were a literal account of English Victorian attitudes toward the Irish” (“Race, Violence …” 369). In a useful review of the revised edition, Catherine Eagan notes that Curtis risks eliding the power of Irish whiteness: “Just as Curtis will not accept the revisionist claim that the white skin color of the Irish made their biological credentials obvious, he should resist the implication that their whiteness had no currency” (“Simianization” 28). Kenny posits a useful middle ground and moves the debate away from the simple question of whether or not the Irish were considered biologically white: “the language of race—whether verbal or visual—tells us less about why some people hated other people than about how they hated them. The detractors of the Irish did not hate the Irish because they were apes; they described them as apes because doing so could be a devastatingly effective mode of explanation and condemnation” (365). Describing the Irish using the language of race made sense in some fashion—it was not received as absurd or inappropriate.

Curtis’s work and the cartoons he brought to light have had a potent effect. They have been used to show, in sometimes broad and sweeping ways, that the Irish were obviously considered a non-white race. Tom Hayden, for example, sees a direct connection between such representations and Irish-American racism: “the Irish-Americans transferred to black people the very racial stereotypes long used against the Irish. Having been stigmatized as chimpanzees, wild animals and bog-creatures, the Irish chose whiteness when the chance came along” (“The Famine of Feeling” 285). My goal here is not to advance argument...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “A Representative Americanized Irishman”
• 3 Melees
• 4 Bernadette’s Legacy
• 5 Ray Charles on Hyndford Street
• 6 Born Under a Bad Sign
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index