How
do emigrants remember the old sod? Do an immigrant's sons and daughters
commemorate their ancestral, often distant, homeland? Can such a place endure
as home within a diaspora?
Within
the motherland, how do natives transform what was left behind? Both those
overseas and those at home perpetuate "memory practices" through
souvenirs, stories, song, and celebrations. Images on walls as pictures or
photos commemorate traditions and concoct new trinkets, kitsch, and art. These
make up the material for the professors and poets who contribute here.
In
my NYJB review
of this series' predecessor, I explained: "This first of four volumes
explores the replacement of chronological historiography with a more fluid,
less rigid approach that investigates what is remembered from the Irish
past." Oona Frawley edits eighteen mainly academic submissions to volume
two. While "rhizomes" and "chronotopic" feature in two of
the first three essay titles, visits to Irish fairs abroad, examinations of
tattoos, and excursions to Gaelic games, cooking, and "the eviction
photograph" explore more familiar contexts for most readers. Aimed at the
Irish Studies and historiographical fields, alternating between theoretical
concerns and accessible examples, this collection will intrigue audiences seeking
a serious study of Irishness in popular culture--more serious than the blarney
and blather which constitutes much of what passes for Irishness in culture.
Nostalgia,
Frawley observes, "has fed into the construction of the cultural memory
that Ireland embodies at home as well" as abroad. Until the independence
of most of the island, Ireland hid many national ideas through symbolic
representation. Therefore, memories themselves "spoke" in acts,
words, and emblems.
Aidan
Arrowsmith looks at British-Irish writing as "postmemory" and finds
many romantic cliches. Chad Habel relates from Irish-Australian novels of
ancestral memory more trauma, perhaps due to such immense distance, to separate
from the homeland as well as a desire among some to recover relationships and
attachments from dormancy and attenuation. Katrin Urschel peers into
Irish-Canadian "physical manifestations" of the homeland within the
vast, multicultural dominion.
From
America, James P. Byrne challenges the usual derivation of nostalgia as
"homecoming" + "pain". He locates a revisionist nostalgia
which advances political and cultural power for emigrants. While Frawley
appears to overstate as "mostly unaddressed" the problem of race in
Irish contexts as if able to be confronted or depicted more outside the island,
Maureen Reddy uses Jim Sheridan's film In America and Roddy Doyle's
novel Oh, Play That Thing and story "Home to Harlem" as case
studies that expand the attention given by current Irish Studies scholars to
"race-inflected" accounts. Spurgeon Thompson's "The Kitsch of
the Dispossessed" excavates as "signifiers" artifacts of
"cultural loss" from Irish America alongside Patrick McCabe's and
Neil Jordan's versions of The Butcher Boy.
Other
objects, as jewelry, souvenirs, and tattoos, Maggie Williams shows, emerge as
"icons of Irishness". The great fairs in the 1890s and 1900s in
Chicago and St. Louis featured simplified "Irish villages, and such visual
displays of a less complex "recent past" endured in the recollections
of visitors, along with mementos. Jewelry temporarily and tattoos indelibly
show an identification--to the public or to intimates--as "signs of
membership in a constructed ethnic and cultural community".
In
the early days of New Zealand, St. Patrick's Day celebrations invoked, Tanja
Bueltmann reports on varying memberships for the small emigrant community
there. For the eminent Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, her shift from
childhood among immigrants to Lancashire dramatically changed when she was
"fostered out" to her Gaelic-speaking aunt's family in West Kerry. Ní
Dhomhnaill feels as if, when she returns to England as an adult, a
"doppelganger" hovers, "the person I would have been if I stayed".
Joop
Leerssen opens part two. He studies as "internal memory transfer" the
gap as the Irish language receded in the nineteenth century and a historic
cultural break found partial repair--as with James Joyce's Dublin
reconstruction in Ulysses-- through determined active and archival
intervention. Of course, Joyce used music as one keen method to evoke memory,
and Katie Brown tackles his mid-nineteenth century predecessors, who blended a
nationalistic mix of static and dynamic shifts of modes and lyrics which filled
Ireland's linguistic breach. Steve Coleman continues with traditional sounds
which embody history variously, and which stir contested innovation into
musical legacies.
The
"eviction photograph" codes a powerfully charged image into this
history, as Gail Baylis scrutinizes their arranged depictions of peasant
expulsion by landlords and their agents. In the 1890s, one series of
"protracted evictions" was exploited for publicity by the Land League
for foreign journalists, English politicians, and "radical sympathizers".
Baylis compares historical with recent appearances, in the press and on
genealogical sites, of "visual coding" from such charged images.
Related
images resist the "outsider" condition given to Travellers, opposed
to what Mícheál Ó hAodha surveys as its emerging "rearticulations"
from within its community to the "anthropological canon". Sara
Brady's analysis of Gaelic sports looks at games in Ireland and overseas as a
primary marker "to stage identity, ethnicity, and place". Hasia Diner
sums up the Irish portion of her book on "foodways in the age of
migration" a century and more ago--the Famine may have contributed as well
as the dependence on the potato to "disassociation of food from identity,
family, and community" but the Irish predilection for alcohol fueled much
of their social life--and anti-British subversion as such beverages eluded
taxation, so the rationalization developed-- no matter where the bonding
transpired.
Cooking
at the "traditional Irish cottage" proliferates as a commemorative subject.
Rhonda Richman Kenneally seeks to redress the emphasis on the hearth and not
the housewife. Cookbooks reveal the incorporation of international and
modernizing influences into the island's "gastronomic heritage" as
defined and delineated by three cooks' narratives from the past seventy years.
Paul
Muldoon, in typically allusive prose segments, starts with rum and Treasure
Island and after forays into matters piratical and puritanical regarding
that demon drink and other brands, and skirting the Troubles of his native
turf, ends with a confrontation, suppressed in part as in many Irish families,
with the coded mention in Robert Louis Stevenson, of alcoholism. With this
memory, so frequent in histories recorded or erased by the Irish over the sea or
back on the island, this collection closes.
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