Please join us as we welcome Prof. Mary Burke (University of Connecticut) at KNI to talk about her new book Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History.
Prof. Burke is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and her work has been featured on NPR, the Irish Times, RTÉ, and Faber. She is a former NEH Fellow here at the Keough-Naughton Institute, and a graduate of TCD and Queen’s University Belfast.
Race, Politics and Irish America
"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 times: 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 Americas: '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'".