Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture

This book sets out to expose through a combination of literary, cultural and historical analysis the fictive nature of Irish monoculturalism and to probe figurations of racial identity, racial difference, and foreignness in Irish culture.

Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture presents a radical re-reading of the cultural history of the Irish state, by demonstrating through original historical research and insightful new readings of key literary and artistic works that race has been central to the ways in which Modern Ireland has defined itself.

John Brannigan examines the tropes of racial identity and racist distinction that underpin modern expressions of Irishness, and shows how a persistent concern with racial ideologies can be traced through twentieth-century Irish culture. In this study, Ulysses is read anew in the context of the gathering of the Irish Race Congress in Paris, and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The works of Liam O''Flaherty, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and Jack Yeats are shown to engage critically with anthropological representations of `the Irish face''. Brannigan reads a wide range of mid-century fiction as part of a public discourse about `foreign bodies'', and goes on to examine the critical conversations taking place in the sixties and seventies about figurations of blackness in Irish culture. A provocative revision of modern Irish cultural history, this book makes challenging interventions in Irish studies, literary and cultural studies, and critical race studies.