Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture By John Brannigan Edinburgh University Press, 246 pp, £65.00
RACE, NO matter the context in which it is discussed, is always a dangerous subject. Even the recent election of a biracial US president after a bitter campaign did not result in open discussion or in diffusing the volatility of the issue.
John Brannigan's study is in itself, then, an act of courage. He eases into his subject with an apt reminder of an episode of Father Tedin which Ted dons a "coolie" lampshade and mimes a Chinese impersonation for Dougal, only to be caught in the act by the sole Chinese inhabitants of Craggy Island. Brannigan isolates the assumptions underlying such racial stereotyping when comedy rapidly turns to injury, regret and defensive postures.
This is not a book about the treatment in life or in art of recent immigrant arrivals in Ireland, although it is written from the multi-racial perspective of present-day Irish reality.
Definitions of the Irish race and the incorporation of these into government, culture and writing in Ireland are his focus. “1922, Ulysses and the Irish Race Congress”, the subject of the first chapter, sheds new light on the gathering held in Paris in the year of the treaty and the publication of Joyce’s novel. One of many diasporic racial conventions, it was always considered a fiasco. Brannigan’s analysis re-situates the event to reveal its specious emphasis on blood lines as typical of the era, and paving the way for the triumphalism and exclusive definitions of Irishness which would dominate for decades.
Linking this assemblage and its manifesto to Joyce's reading proofs of Ulyssesa few blocks away is not contrivance. He finds much in the text to illustrate Joyce's keen awareness of his countrymen's activities nearby.
It isn’t a leap from racial congresses to the anthropological preoccupation with physiognomy of the period. The Harvard Irish Study, funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, sought to categorise Irish facial types with implications of relevant levels of intelligence and other variables. The study was sanctioned by the Free State. The taxonomy developed by it provides a link to Irish modernism and character in the work of Liam O’Flaherty, Jack Yeats and Samuel Beckett.
Similarities between the photographic images from the study and Yeats's canvasses are striking, but also convincing are O'Flaherty's descriptions of criminal type in The Informer.
Brannigan traces a more familiar strain of fictional foreigners in mid-century, when few applied for admission to the Irish State and only a handful were refused. It was a xenophobic era all the same. "Ireland of the Welcomes" was debunked by Denis Johnston in The Moon in the Yellow River, in Kate O'Brien's The Last of Summer, and in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls.
Brannigan’s concept of “New Hibernia” would not be the embrace of the diaspora urged benignly by Mary Robinson and with economic motive by David McWilliams, but Leopold Bloom’s “Nova Hibernia”. Brannigan argues it’s time to put the coolie hat – along with Irish racial theories – in the archive, where fact becomes artefact.
Christina Hunt Mahony directs the Center for Irish Studies at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, and is editor of Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Carysfort, 2006)