Abstract
In this chapter, I examine one case of sustained intervention in discourses of race during a volatile period in Irish social life, focusing on Roddy Doyle’s fiction serialized in Metro Eireann between May 2000 and December 2004: ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’, ‘The Deportees’, ‘57% Irish’, ‘I Understand’ and ‘Home to Harlem’. In the first four of these texts, Doyle explores the shifting meanings of Irishness and the complex, fraught relation of race and nation in an Ireland whose population is changing rapidly due to immigration. With the fifth story, ‘Home to Harlem’ (titled after Claude McKay’s controversial 1928 novel), Doyle makes a move similar to the central conceit of his recent novel, Oh, Play That Thing (2004), moving his main character, a young Irish man, to the US and counterpointing Irish and American racial attitudes.1
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Notes
Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004).
Throughout this essay, I am influenced by a large body of cultural and, especially, race theory. See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998);
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: the Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992);
Charles Taylor and Susan Wolf, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
and Stuart Hall, The Real Me — Postmodernism and the Question of Identity (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987).
See, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: the Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Although Nussbaum focuses on nineteenth-century realist novels, the case she makes applies in its basic form to realist fiction in general.
Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
For the intertwining of whiteness and Americanness, see Ian E. Haney Lopez, White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
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© 2007 Maureen T. Reddy
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Reddy, M.T. (2007). Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann. In: Balzano, W., Mulhall, A., Sullivan, M. (eds) Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800588_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800588_2
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