Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans. Onkey examines how Irish and Irish-American identity is often constructed through or against African-Americans, mapping this through the work of writers, playwrights, political activists, and musicians.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed - and thereby created - a "black" identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays contemplates whether ‘music in Ireland’ can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland and Music that give rise to multiple sites of identification. Arranged in interweaving sections of ‘Historical Perspectives’, ‘Recent and Contemporary Production’ and ‘Cultural Explorations’ its various chapters act to juxtapose the socio-historical distinctions between the major style categories - traditional, classical and popular - and to explore a range of dialectical relationship(s) between these musical styles in matters pertaining to national and cultural identity.

Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond represents the first interdisciplinary volume of chapters on an intricate cultural field that can be experienced and interpreted in manifold ways, whether in Ireland (The Republic of Ireland and/or Northern Ireland), among its diaspora(s), or further afield. While each contributor addresses particular themes viewed from discrete perspectives, collectively the book contemplates whether ’music in Ireland’ can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland (geographical, political, diasporic, mythical) and Music (including a proliferation of practices and genres) that give rise to multiple sites of identification. Arranged in the relatively distinct yet interweaving parts of ’Historical Perspectives’, ’Recent and Contemporary Production’ and ’Cultural Explorations’, its various chapters act to juxtapose the socio-historical distinctions between the major style categories most typically associated with music in Ireland - traditional, classical and popular - and to explore a range of dialectical relationships between these musical styles in matters pertaining to national and cultural identity. The book includes a number of chapters that examine various movements (and ’moments’) of traditional music revival from the late eighteenth century to the present day, as well as chapters that tease out various issues of national identity pertaining to individual composers/performers (art music, popular music) and their audiences. Many chapters in the volume consider mediating influences (infrastructural, technological, political) and/or social categories (class, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age) in the interpretation of music production and consumption. Performers and composers discussed include U2, Raymond Deane, Afro-Celt Sound System, E.J. Moeran, Séamus Ennis, Kevin O’Connell, Stiff Little Fingers, Frederick May, Arnold

Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person—through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden—on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience—elite, popular, and everything in between.

After all the green beer has been poured and the ubiquitous shamrocks fade away, what does it mean to be Irish American besides St. Patrick’s Day? Who’s Your Paddy traces the evolution of “Irish” as a race-based identity in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present day. Exploring how the Irish have been and continue to be socialized around race, Jennifer Nugent Duffy argues that Irish identity must be understood within the context of generational tensions between different waves of Irish immigrants as well as the Irish community’s interaction with other racial minorities. Using historic and ethnographic research, Duffy sifts through the many racial, class, and gendered dimensions of Irish-American identity by examining three distinct Irish cohorts in Greater New York: assimilated descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants; “white flighters” who immigrated to postwar America and fled places like the Bronx for white suburbs like Yonkers in the 1960s and 1970s; and the newer, largely undocumented migrants who began to arrive in the 1990s. What results is a portrait of Irishness as a dynamic, complex force in the history of American racial consciousness, pertinent not only to contemporary immigration debates but also to the larger questions of what it means to belong, what it means to be American.

Since its publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind has held a unique position in American cultural memory, both for its particular vision of the American South in the age of the Civil War and for its often controversial portrayals of race, gender, and class. New Approaches to “Gone with the Wind” offers neither apology nor rehabilitation for the novel and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Instead, the nine essays provide distinct, compelling insights that challenge and complicate conventional associations. Racial and sexual identity form a cornerstone of the collection: Mark C. Jerng and Charlene Regester each examine Margaret Mitchell’s reframing of traditional racial identities and the impact on audience sympathy and engagement. Jessica Sims mines Mitchell’s depiction of childbirth for what it reveals about changing ideas of femininity in a postplantation economy, while Deborah Barker explores transgressive sexuality in the film version by comparing it to the depiction of rape in D. W. Griffith’s earlier silent classic, Birth of a Nation. Other essays position the novel and film within the context of their legacy and their impact on national and international audiences. Amy Clukey and James Crank inspect the reception of Gone with the Wind by Irish critics and gay communities, respectively. Daniel Cross Turner, Keaghan Turner, and Riché Richardson consider its aesthetic impact and mythology, and the ways that contemporary writers and artists, such as Natasha Trethewey and Kara Walker, have engaged with the work. Finally, Helen Taylor sums up the pervading influence that Gone with the Wind continues to exert on audiences in both America and Britain. Through an emphasis on intertextuality, sexuality, and questions of audience and identity, these essayists deepen the ongoing conversation about the cultural impact and influence of this monumental work. Flawed in many ways yet successful beyond its time, Gone with the Wind remains a touchstone in southern studies.