Introduction: Memory, History, and the Shaping of the Irish American Present

O’Leary Anish, Beth

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-83194-3_1

Beth O’Leary Anish³

Part of the book series: New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ((NDIIAL))

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Abstract

The introduction lays out the historical and theoretical groundwork for this study. It includes a brief survey of Irish American history, with a special focus on the formative years for the novelists included. Immigration trends, World War I, the Great Depression, anti-communism, and the changing Catholic Church, all factor into their worldview. Theories of memory and postcolonialism are used to ground an understanding of the fictional works to be covered in later chapters.

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Notes

1.
Mission statement of Irish Stand: “Irish Stand is a grassroots movement devoted to civil rights protection for all immigrants. Ireland’s history of migration and overcoming discrimination positions it uniquely as a nation that understands and is familiar with division and borders. We believe in compassionate resistance to hateful rhetoric and seek to support vulnerable communities under threat through active campaigning.” Retrieved from https://irish-stand.com/about/.
2.
David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 135–137.
3.
Frank McCourt, The Irish and How They Got That Way (first performed at the Irish Repertory Theater, 1997).
4.
Matthew J. O'Brien, “Transatlantic connections,” 38–39.
5.
Kenny, American Irish, 228.
6.
J.J. Lee, Making the Irish American, 38.
7.
Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy, 41; Charles Fanning, Irish Voice in America, 312.
8.
Jennifer Guglielmo, “White Lies, Dark Truths,” 12.
9.
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whitness, 7.
10.
Kenny, American Irish, 227.
11.
Fanning, Irish Voice in America, 239.
12.
Kenny, American Irish, 227.
13.
Giunta, Writing with an Accent, 59.
14.
Mary C. Kelly, Ireland's Great Famine in Irish American History, 97.
15.
This book is not the first to address the Irish in America during the 15 years between World War II and John F. Kennedy’s presidential election. In After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960, editors James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O’Brien offer a collection of essays capturing the historical significance of this period to Irish American ethnicity.
16.
John V. Kelleher, “Irish American Literature, and Why There Isn’t Any,” 127.
17.
Homi Bhabha tells us that “Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present,” Location of Culture, 90.
18.
For an extreme example of how anti-Irish discrimination played out, see Thomas H. O’Connor’s The Boston Irish, in which he details the how the hostility to the arrival of the famine Irish in the mid-nineteenth century and their continued residence in the city shaped the course of the city’s history and the unique ethnic dimension of its Irish population.
19.
Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 58.
20.
Lee, Making the Irish American, 27.
21.
David M. Emmons, Beyond the American Pale, 212.
22.
Ebest, Private Histories, 4–5.
23.
For an example, see Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 16.
24.
Lee, Making the Irish American, 18.
25.
Mary C. Kelly, The Shamrock and the Lily, 183.
26.
In 1900, per Kevin Kenny, the Irish-born population in the United States was over 1.6 million, and the second generation (having at least one Irish-born parent) reached its peak at nearly 3.4 million. Kenny says, “These five million first and second generation Irish Americans in 1900 exceeded the entire population of Ireland by more than 500,000,” American Irish, 131.
27.
Maurice Halbwachs, The Social Frameworks of Memory, 38.
28.
Halbwachs, 51.
29.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 41.
30.
Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, 41.
31.
Robert W. Snyder, “The Neighborhood Changed,” 452.
32.
For a full discussion on these Irish “slaves” memes, please follow historian Liam Hogan on Twitter, @Limerick1914.
33.
Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, 41.
34.
It is important to note, as Arjun Appadurai points out in Modernity at Large, other immigrants with darker complexions do not have as much choice in how they will remake themselves in this country, 171.
35.
Margaret Hallissy, Reading Irish American Fiction, 7.
36.
Quoted in David A. Gerber and Alan M. Kraut, Editors, American Immigration and Ethnicity, 105.
37.
Shaun O’Connell, “That Much Credit,” 252–254.
38.
Lee, Making the Irish American, 37–38.
39.
Ebest, 238.
40.
Ebest, 237–238.
41.
Even for immigrant Indian authors, in Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie explains that imagination is at work in creating “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind,” 10.
42.
Ebest, 239–240.
43.
Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French, 29.
44.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 18.
45.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 12.
46.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 182.
47.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 3.
48.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 551–561; David Lloyd, Anomolous States, 54.
49.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 13.
50.
Roediger, 144.
51.
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 2.
52.
Kenny, American Irish, 67–68.
53.
George Lipsitz explains how white ethnics came to be middle class, with government help, while people of color were not allowed such opportunities. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 193.
54.
Quinn, Looking for Jimmy, 276.
55.
David Lloyd, Irish Times, 41–42.
56.
Quinn, Looking for Jimmy, 80.
57.
Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 48.
58.
For Ernest Renan, “the social capital on which one bases a national idea” is “to have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more.” In his famous speech delivered in Paris in 1892, “What is a Nation?” Renan says, “these are the essential conditions for being a people,” 10.
59.
O’Connor, Boston Irish, 80.
60.
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest,129.
61.
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 86–87.
62.
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest,130.
63.
Evelyn Sterne, Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence, 254.
64.
Donald F. Crosby, S.J. God, Church, and Flag, 6.
65.
Crosby, 4.
66.
Sterne, Ballots and Bibles, 254–255.
67.
Kevin Kenny discusses the influential role played by Irish American labor leaders throughout the first half of the twentieth century in The American Irish, 188–192. Most Irish American led unions were of the moderate, conservative variety at that time, per Kenny, 189.
68.
Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 21–22.
69.
Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics, 6–8. Interestingly, Smith calls the films through which he examines these changes ethnic and Catholic, but never names them as Irish, though the principle directors and actors are all of Irish descent, as are the characters they create and play.
70.
Brinkley, 93.
71.
Brinkley, 93.
72.
Brinkley, 202.
73.
Quoted in Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 33.
74.
David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 163.
75.
Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 151.
76.
Crosby, 190.
77.
Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 56.
78.
Crosby, God, Church, and Flag. 36.
79.
Crosby, 172.
80.
Robert Coles, Dorothy Day, 94.
81.
M. Barga, “Monsignor John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945): Economist, Theologian, Writer, Social Reformer”.
82.
Ron Grossman, “Chicago Bishop Saw Refuge for Youths in the Boxing Ring”.
83.
From a letter to Bo Beskow, November 16, 1951, just weeks after Steinbeck completed writing East of Eden. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, Editors, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 431.

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Community College of Rhode Island, Lincoln, RI, USA
Beth O’Leary Anish

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O’Leary Anish, B. (2021). Introduction: Memory, History, and the Shaping of the Irish American Present. In: Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83194-3_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83194-3_1
Published: 03 November 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83193-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83194-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

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