BLACK, WHITE, AND RED ON GREEN, WHITE, AND ORANGE: RACIAL AND COLONIAL DISCOURSES IN IRISH AND AMERICAN MINORITY LITERATURES

NEMLA Annual Convention
March 31 - April 2, 2005
Hyatt Regency Hotel
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Panel Organizer:
Sebastian T. Bach, English Department
Boston University

Thanks to recent revisionist criticism, scholars of Irish literary history find themselves in the position to address the frequent intersection of racial and colonial discourses that provided both ammunition for and protection against assertions of English hegemony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to the constellation of different concepts that “race” entailed in European thought of this period, British colonialism justified its hold over Ireland via a wide variety of perceived biological, socioeconomic, political, and religious superiorities, which, by contradistinction, constituted the backwardness of the Irish. The breadth of these definitions of race also facilitated conceptual slippages between the Irish and other oppressed peoples, not to mention lesser creatures. Both scholarly commentary and the British popular press compared the Irish to various animal species (e.g., swine, reptiles, apes) and non-white human races, such as Africans (and African-Americans) and Native Americans. At the same time, similar characterizations of Irish-American immigrants populated the pages of American letters and journalism. In the ante- and post-bellum United States, African-Americans frequently found themselves uneasily sharing a nearly comparable socioeconomic status with Irish-Americans. Moreover, with the simultaneous, mid-nineteenth century emergence of Fenianism in the United States and Ireland, critical and popular response to revolutionary violence compared the Irish to bestial, bloodthirsty, revolting slaves. Consequently, images of the Irish and Irish-Americans as white Negroes or papist savages took shape on both sides of the Atlantic with manifold consequences.

This panel seeks papers on literary representations of and/or sympathies (or antipathies) between the Irish and American racial minorities within racial and colonial discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially welcome are new approaches to analysis of racial and colonial discourses and their convergence. Topics may include but are not limited to transatlantic political influences and collaborations, Irish(-American) representations of American minorities, American representations of the Irish(-Americans), Irish(-American) representations of the Irish(-Americans) and American minorities, American minority representations of American minorities and the Irish(-Americans), similar challenges to colonialism and oppression (including stereotype reversals), racial and cultural hybridity between Irish(-Americans) and American minorities, and literary offerings of alternative discourses to address differences between the Irish(-Americans), American minorities, and their political adversaries.

Selected Further Reading:

Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge UP,
      1995)

L. P. Curtis, Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of
      Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Univ. of
      Bridgeport, 1968)

—  Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian
      Caricature (Rev. Ed.) (Smithsonian Instit. Press, 1997)

Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Univ.
      of Notre Dame Press, 1996)

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge,
      1995)

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Harvard UP, 1996)

Tracy Mishkin, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances:
      Language, Identity, and Representation (UP of
      Florida, 1998)

Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in
      Theory, Culture and Race (Routledge, 1995)

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To Submit a Paper Proposal by September 15, 2004:

Option 1
Please send a 250-300 word abstract in Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, or Adobe Acrobat format to Sebastian T. Bach via e-mail at nakedlun@bu.edu (preferred method).

Option 2
Please send a 250-300 word abstract to Sebastian T. Bach using the electronic form below (preferred method).

Option 3
Please send a 250-300 word abstract to
Sebastian T. Bach
Boston University English Department
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA, 02215

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