Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History

by Mary M Burke

Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon'
Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.

Genres: Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Race, American

272 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2023

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rich, complex, and nuanced study of the history of the Irish in America—both post- and pre-famine (a distinction I had never heard of). The various topics are clearly presented and many themes are presented separately and then interwoven throughout the text, adding both depth and texture to the work. I was a little overwhelmed by how much information was presented and progressed slowly—I wanted to learn as much as I could of the material. It was like a course in one book but its density was belied by the smoothness of the writing. Burke gives enough information (and how it fits into the overall work) to keep the reader engaged but not so much as to overwhelm (unless, like me, the reader is actually attempting to remember everything read—better to reread the book or just take notes, I think in retrospect). There is so much information and topics of interest in this book that I can only begin to address some of those which were of particular interest to me.

Burke uses a combination of historical facts and Irish-American writers to inform the reader. And, as indicated in the sub-title, many of these works are gothic, some haunted by the writer’s Irish past and struggles to come to terms with it—or, in some cases (Henry James is a case in point) deny it.

Burke shows the complexity of the Irish-American’s attitudes and actions regarding race. Considered (at best) “off-white,” the Irish could have joined forces with black people in this country but many chose instead to align with the white power base and “become white.”

As a side note, I had never considered how the face of Irish-America is presented as white while many people of color have white Irish and Irish-American ancestry (sometimes as close as a parent).

I was fascinated by Burke’s analysis of a variety of writers through their handling of their Irish-American heritage. Her study of Eugene O’Neill was particularly interesting (and sent me back to reading his plays—I love when a book stirs up my desire to read other books).

In Burke’s final chapter she examines the figures of Grace Kelly and the Kennedy family as the first “Irish royalty” in the United States. I had no idea how committed Kelly was to her Irish ancestry (only dating back to her grandfather, born in Ireland) or how she brought Irish and Irish American writers into mainstream American culture. Burke argues that Kelly established Irish-Americans as fully “white” and acceptable members of the socially elite. She also presents a case for the idea that Kelly (and her televised and widely-watched—an estimated 30 million viewers—marriage to the Prince of Monaco) paved the way for the first Irish-American president, John F. Kennedy.

Included in this chapter is an analysis of some of the works of John O’Hara and Kelly’s uncle, playwright George Kelly. As in the rest of the book, Burke’s literary discussions and inferences are insightful and thought-provoking.

The final section of the Epilogue is called “Coda: Irishness, the US Presidency, and Black Lives Matter” addresses the increasing conservatism of Irish Americans (something which, as someone with Irish roots on my mother’s side, sadden and embarrasses me) and the relationship of Barack Obama to this culture.

Of course, this book will probably be of particular interest to Irish-American (or Scots or any Gaelic related) reader. But I think anyone in writing and writers and their efforts to come to terms with their history—both personal and ethnic—in their work will find this book of interest. It both answered questions I had while offering new ones. Best of all, as I said before, it created a desire to read (or, in many cases, re-read) the authors discussed with a different perspective.

A terrific book: well-written and illuminating of much of American history, politics, and culture.

Strongly recommended.

[MM Broadstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

curious about how the Irish rose from abjection in the 17th-century Caribbean to the presidency (Kennedy), royalty (Grace of Monaco) and the topmost tier of Trump's administration? Then read this. 'Race' in the book concerns Black-white relations, absolutely, but also enfolds mixed-race Irish American writers – the best-selling mid century Frank Yerby was a revelation – and ethnic pecking order in-fighting between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics in America. The broad idea of ‘Irish’ offered - Catholic and Protestant, Caribbean as well as North American, Black and white - and the author’s way of reeling in significant African Americans in the orbit of Irish-America leads to the inclusion of some surprising people. As a result, the cast is diverse: Grace Kelly, John F. and Jackie Kennedy, Andrew Jackson, Trump, Obama, John Wayne, Frederick Douglass, Maureen O’Hara, Eudora Welty, Faulkner, O’Neill, Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Paul Robeson, the family of Rihanna, and even the half-Irish Mariah Carey, whose promotion of her alcoholic drink 'Black Irish' makes a cameo. It is peppered with thought-provoking connections - between Andrew Jackson and ‘Gone with the Wind’ author Margaret Michell, Grace Kelly and Josephine Baker, and O'Neill and Robeson. The book discusses sympathetically how the Irish were 'not fully white' but holds no punches in discussing how awful Irish treatment of Black and indigenous Americans got sometimes also. This isn't 'ethnic pride' history, but it's all the better for that, needless to say. The author's New Books Network podcast first alerted me to the book, so go there if you want to hear her speak on some of what’s covered in this book.

[Marg Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting and original look at the Irish in centuries of American fiction, plays, movies, etc. using frameworks of race, ethnicity and traumatic Irish history. Fairy tale and gothic are used to tell that story in a fresh way, so Graces Kelly’s rise to royalty as Princess of Monaco in the 1950s is described as the Irish assimilation moment that allowed the Kennedy clan to rise in the decade after. The stand out for me was this line about Jackie Kennedy right after her JFK's assassination-
"If Grace Kelly’s pristine white bridal gown signified the Irish American fairy tale, then its Gothic inverse is the First Lady’s white leather gloves, so stiff with her husband’s dried blood in the wake of his assassination that she had to be assisted in their removal."
The author makes the point that the Kennedy story was described with Gothic vocabulary (family curses and conspiracy and all that) after the assassinations of JFK and RFK and Ted’s shenanigans.

[Michael Malley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book argues for a more expansive history and definition of irishness than I have come across before and it was an enlightening read. The Irish seem to have been in the Americas from the beginning and to have held a contradictory position between white and not quite, assimilated and low caste. The author writes that the Irish were both victims and perpetrators within Americas racial system, a short phrase that could synopsize the whole book. It has left me with lots to think about since one half of my family is Irish but they are not conscious that their ancestors would not have been considered white. I was directly recommended this book by another good reads member and appreciate the suggestion - keep them coming

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for an excellent examination of the interactions between Race, Politics and Irish Americans from colonial times to the present day. This is a scholarly work with 51 pages of footnotes and a 16 page bibliography. It took me 14 days to read this book, even though it is only 272 pages long. I could only read 5-10 pages of text per day, along with 4 or 5 pages of footnotes. I admit that I am a pedant who reads all the footnotes and the bibliography, because they help me understand the subject matter better.
I was aware of the distinction between Scots Irish and famine Irish but was not aware of other categories of Irish heritage, such as Hiberno-Norman, indicating Norman or pre-Norman ancestors. According to this book, I have some Norman ancestry, since my surname is one of the Norman invaders in the 12th century. I was also aware of political cartoons depicting Irish immigrants with ape like features but did not connect these cartoons to the same type of cartoons depicting black people with ape like features. Both were common in 19th century America.
The author examines the role of the Irish in America through many authors, including Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald , Henry James and Margaret Mitchell to name some of the authors examined
I have read some of O'Neill's plays, but found Fitzgerald and James too boring to read. I never read Gone with the Wind but did watch the movie 1 time. I remember that it was my mother's favorite movie and she watched it many times. Another author that she examines is Frank Yerby, an African Irish American, who I was unaware of until now.
One quote on famine Irish: "According to Mary V. Kelly, the multi generation Irish progress from tenement to mainstream, and from stigmatized, oof-white refugee to white establishment necessitated amnesia regarding the famine."
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how Irish Americans fit into the larger American society. The author closes with a picture of President Obama celebrating St. Patrick's day with some distant Irish cousins.
There is a YouTube video of the author speaking about her book. Do a search for "Mary M. Burke" Be sure to include the middle initial, or else you will get a yoga lady.
Thanks to Mary M. Burke for sending me a signed copy of this book through LibraryThing.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is deeply irresponsible.

Beyond the simple fact that much of the text is a minefield of conceits towards Irish America and distorted flattening of complex histories through the class-blind lens of a select few literati and wealthy elites, this book is doing a dishonest nationalistic project for a liberal Ireland ever concerned about its wayward diaspora in America.

The very conception of a literary survey that extrudes readings of contemporary Irish America from the race politics of the 50s/60s, or the time of O’Neill and Fitzgerald, or the time of Henry James, is an academic folly resultant of an attitude that plays fast and quick with the definition of modern Irish America. Reinserting the Scotch Irish into the equation only showed Burke’s lack of knowledge about this living community.

Her repetition of the assumption of Irish America’s growing conservatism is not cited anywhere in her book. It is an assumption she has made, likely based on her own prejudices, as the very idea of a massive Irish American shift to the right has been put into question by a bare modicum of polling data. Liam Kennedy now notes has shown Irish America is far more progressive than previously imagined.

I get the feeling that Burke encountered a lack of evidence to prove her theories of growing conservatism, because the article she does cite is about the Catholic church, one that does not mention Irish America at all, and the current trend within Irish America is away from Catholicism. She has to actively ignore the historical sea change within an Irish America quickly abandoning the post-Spotlight Catholic church in order to make her gothic history work.

This gothic reading of Irish America could likewise only have worked if she imagined Irish America as “in decay,” and as such, she must accept without question the legitimacy of long contested ethnic fade theories in order to frame Irish American history as a single track towards assimilation, or in her words, a unique “social drive to whiteness” that Irish Americans (but not Irish people of course) are at large complicit in.

Her ending coda reveals a pretty vile liberal nationalism that uplifts Obama as the example for “what could have been” in modern Irish America. She seems to believe the Irish in Ireland who inherited an infrastructure built on a slave economy as a part of the British empire, are not complicit in European colonialism or the formation of white supremacy. Burke is a graduate of Trinity and Queens, two institutions whose history is intertwined with human chattel, and I have to wonder if this history is her own gothic closet, because she seems to want to keep it closed.

In a particularly telling moment, she asks the reader to draw conclusions about race and Irish America from a coffee table book about the all-white faces of the Irish in America to which she compares her own choice of a “more knowing” endeavor by a solo artist painting the all-white teenage girls in Ireland in 2006.

As such, Irish America, to Burke, is doomed to a nostalgia, Catholicity, and a whiteness that is singularly cheap, supremacist, and capitalistic. Ireland, alternatively, remains literary, dynamic, and secular, where whiteness, she seems to claim, is nuanced, self-aware, and artistic.

This, combined with her arguably tokenized Irish people of color, demonstrated to me Mary Burke’s own lack of personal racial reckoning with whiteness, and the whiteness of the Irish in Ireland. Which is to say, Race, Politics, and Irish America, in its assertions about an “increasing chasm” between the racial politics of Ireland and the diaspora, ages horribly in the context of the 2023 Dublin riots and Coolock Says No.

This book is particularly unethical when it chooses to imagine an original sin passed down through “the Irish American male body” in order to underpin its desire to invent a zombified Gothicism out of Irish American white supremacy, a crime the Irish in Ireland, with their long flirtations with antisemitism and their “surprise” ethno-nationalism, is also complicit in. It is a troubling sign when academia strays so far from its humanistic mission as to feel comfortable inventing in its own versions of Catholic sin for the Irish American male body. I reject this idea flat out as a form of academic genetic determinism.

I am admittedly shocked that this book is being so well received within certain parts of Irish Studies, notably literary studies, but also notably NOT history, which has been aware of these flawed and prejudiced arguments for decades. As a queer Irish American currently existing within a community of diverse values that now feels regularly embattled by Irish assumptions about our legitimacy and politics, this book was the symbolic final nail in the coffin for my belief that Irish studies is failing the diaspora.

I hope Burke, like Liam Kennedy is currently doing with his own flawed research, can exit her social media bubble and learn ethnographic ethics if she wishes to explore further the social sciences as a means to make legitimate claims about living identities, and rid herself of her own liberal nationalism which upholds Obama, who has a legacy of drone striking families in the middle east and funding Israeli apartheid, as the “what could have been.”

Anyways… I lost too many braincells reading this. Irish arrogance never ceases.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and beautifully-written book about the complexities of race and Irishness in America.

[Mathieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very fine book, carefully researched, often insightful. Highly recommended. Full review to come soon in Etudes irlandaises.