Table of Contents

The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture / Diane Negra 1
“Still ‘Black’ and ‘Proud’”: Irish America and the Racial Politics of Hibernophilia / Catherine M. Eagan 20
The Wearing of the Green: Performing Irishness in the Fox Wartime Musical / Sean Griffin 64
“The Best Kept Secret in Retail”: Selling Irishness in Contemporary America / Natasha Casey 84
“Papa Don’t Preach”: Pregnancy and Performance in Contemporary Irish Cinema / Maria Pramaggiore 110
rish Roots: Genealogy and the Performance of Irishness / Stephanie Rains 130
Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul / Lauren Onkey 161
Garth Brooks in Ireland, or, Play That Country Music, Whiteboys / Mary McGlynn 196
“Does the Rug Match the Carpet?”: Race, Gender, and the Redheaded Woman / Amanda Third 220
Dead, White, and Male: Irishness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel / Gerardine Meaney 254
“A Bit of Traveller in Everybody”: Traveller Identities in Irish and American Culture / Maeve Connolly 282
Feeling Éire(y): On Irish-Caribbean Popular Culture / Michael Malouf 318
Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics before and after September 11 / Diane Negra 354
Contributors 373
Index 377

Promotional Information

Essays examining how Irish identity is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, in Frank McCourt's writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers and in the movie The Crying Game

About the Author

Diane Negra is Senior Lecturer in the School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom and a coeditor (with Jennifer M. Bean) of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"The essays in this collection are to Irish studies what B. B. King and the Chicago Blues are to the Delta Blues: they draw on an existing body of work, virtuosically extend it, and at the same time electrify it, creating new forms in the process. In this respect, this collection is the book that many in Irish studies have been waiting for." Margot Backus, author of The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order "Diane Negra has built a dynamic cultural studies anthology from the sophisticated research of a new generation of scholars. 'Irishness,' still an attractive or scandalous stereotype, is here understood through reflection on nation, ethnicity, class, and gender--reflection that is in turn animated by the obtuseness of 'Irishness' in its newly global situation. Expressing a variety of views through vivid examples, this anthology becomes itself exemplary." Dudley Andrew, Yale University