Status Updates From The End of Irish-America?: ...

Each of these essays comes close to understanding Irish America as what it actually is, an ethnic sub culture in the US and not a bastion of Irish culture, but ultimately is subsumed by a general european cultural hegemony that views any deviation from the course of the home nation as inauthentic or a betrayal. As a young, queer, Irish American, this is a very frustrating book to read.

There are some deep issues with this book, most notably that it attempts to read Irish America from an Irish perspective, and not from an Irish American perspective, and in doing so, makes the oh so common Irish mistake of seeing Irish America as a monolith from which Irish people need to distance themselves, and cannot fathom that Ireland, both south and north, are themselves member states of the western empire.