Abstract
Across various fields of cultural production, the Irish diaspora’s impact on how Ireland markets itself abroad and sculpts its identity within has profoundly shaped the Irish imaginary. Within this imaginary, a range of contradictions and silences abound. Among them is the frequent omission of worker narratives and proletarian struggles from often sanitised representations of Irish diasporic experience. By applying David Lloyd’s ideas on the “non-modern” and “out of kilter” “recalcitrant culture” of Ireland under Empire to early twentieth-century narratives of Irish emigrant experience in Britain, Pierse considers how Patrick MacGill’s, James Hanley’s and Robert Tressell’s writings depict the Irish abroad and their relationship to concepts of “home.” The chapter considers how these narratives have salient lessons for our conceptualisation of the Irish diaspora today.
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Notes
- 1.
The song, fittingly, was written in 1915 by the Swedish-American leftist Joe Hill (whose legend would also give rise to one of the most famous songs of American trade union culture).
- 2.
Theodore Dreiser quoted in Lee and Casey (2006: 491).
- 3.
This was Ford’s most commercially successful film to that point. It was nominated for six Oscar awards and won two. As Leonard Engel (2001: 291–2) observes: “Shot on location in Ireland, filled with stars, and emphasizing the theme of family relationships, the film captured the hearts of most of America’s movie audience; it may be Ford’s most popular movie.”
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Pierse, M. (2018). “Coeval but Out of Kilter”: Diaspora, Modernity and “Authenticity” in Irish Emigrant Worker Writing. In: Devlin Trew, J., Pierse, M. (eds) Rethinking the Irish Diaspora. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40784-5_11
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