The idea that "the Irish became white" in the nineteenth century has
set the terms for most work on Irish racialization since Noel Ignatiev
presented that memorable formulation in 1995. Ignatiev's influential
analysis argued that "the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland,
became part of an oppressing race in America" because,
fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the
material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an
American slave[, t]hey came to a society in which color was important in
determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar
with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted
to it in short order. (How the Irish Became White, 1--2)
The subsequent three decades have seen important modifications and
critiques of this account (from Paul Gilroy, David Lloyd, Peter O'Neill,
and others), but Patrick O'Malley's The Irish and the Imagination of
Race systematically dismantles its framework, both marking and
helping to produce an overdue reset of core tenets of Irish studies,
nineteenth century studies, and whiteness studies.
O'Malley marshals wide-ranging, transatlantic documentation--from
fiction, journalism, political speeches, and beyond--to show that "at
least an incipient Irish whiteness must precede, rather than arise out
of, the historical developments that Ignatiev details" (30). The
conditions of the Irish peasant were not properly comparable to
those of an American slave; the relationship between color and social
position was long familiar to Irish immigrants. But most
strikingly, O'Malley demonstrates that Irish "adaptation" to American
white supremacy often operated through the strategic deployment of
precisely these kinds of misleading parallels, flights-to-innocence, and
false equivalences between distinct experiences of oppression.
Rather than an "oppressed race" becoming an oppressive one, then,
O'Malley characterizes the rise of Irish white supremacy in
nineteenth-century America as a failure of translation, arguing that the
rhetorical genres and codes of Irish nationalism "frequently lost their
liberationist drive in the new cultural and moral context of racial
structures and racial oppression on either side of the Atlantic" (5).
Following Frederick Douglass ("A Nation in the Midst of a Nation"),
O'Malley suggests that the nineteenth century saw a "devil's bargain by
which Irish Americans paid for the privileges of whiteness through the
assumption of racial violence [...] trading the possibility of a coalition
of sympathy for the lie of whiteness, produced by and through racism"
(130). But he also emphasizes that such a betrayal was only possible
because the universalisms on which such a "coalition of sympathy" might
have seemed to rely were false ones.
The key reason these "translations" of Irish liberationism into a
racial milieu fail, for O'Malley, is the structural asymmetry between
the constructs of whiteness and blackness, which must be understood as
qualitatively different rather than straightforwardly opposite. Drawing
heavily on Frank Wilderson's concept of the ruse of analogy and, mostly
implicitly, on a theorization of Black ontology rooted in Fanon,
O'Malley's readings repeatedly emphasize the contrast between a static
model of blackness and a fluid conception of whiteness. So, the very
features of Irish racialization that have been sometimes taken to
complicate Irish whiteness--"whiteness to lose" (49), participation in
"white racial consolidation" (97), "splintered whiteness" (98), the
"construction of a transethnic whiteness" (184)--are powerfully refigured
as the very index of racial privilege. The multiplicity and fluidity of
whiteness both relies on and participates in the configuration of
blackness as totalized and fixed; "the romance of white precarity" (128)
is a drama of racial prestige unthinkable without the fixed backdrop of
a denigrated and immobile category of blackness.
O'Malley's substantive intervention into cultural history is
mobilized through, and doubled by, a second, methodological intervention
into the theory of literary genre. He argues that literary and
rhetorical generic translations from the Irish to the American concepts
creates an illusion of commonality, a "putative generic similarity" that
"can undermine the need for both coalitional politics and the ethical
account of difference" (18--9). To this extent, literary dislocations in
the United States (sometimes geographical, but as often conceptual) of
the gothic, the nationalist poem, the realist novel, the political
polemic, and the stage melodrama, to each of which O'Malley dedicates a
chapter, transform how those genres work, both politically and
aesthetically. To this extent, the book advances a contextualist theory
of genre, refusing familiar questions of generic ideology (is melodrama
conservative, is realism bourgeois, and so forth) in order to think
through genre as necessarily a kind of strategic repurposing. For a work
to partake of a genre is also to differentiate itself from that genre,
including through extratextual factors like readership community,
authorial identity, and cultural circumstances; texts must name and
theorize these differences in order to avoid nefariously obfuscating
them.
Depending on the author, the genre, and the context, these failures
of translation take different forms, but they are unified by their
anti-Blackness This can look like appropriative analogies that erase
differences, as in gothicized rhetorics of Irish "slavery," or,
conversely, like the disavowal of that analogy through an emphasis on
rights due to the Irish as white people. It can involve opportunistic
apathy to the condition of Black Americans or enthusiastic opposition to
their rights. But across O'Malley's cases, we are presented with the
disturbing spectacle of an "anticolonialism [...] of white grievance"
(231). Not all nineteenth-century Irish nationalism was white
supremacist--O'Malley is careful to note significant Irish figures who
partook to greater or lesser degree in real solidarity with Black
counterparts--but he insists it was white, self-consciously and
politically so. The ideological and identitarian shifts of emigration,
then, must be understood not as an arrival at whiteness but as
"whiteness com[ing] to be expressed differently"--typically, by being
"mobilized [...] to enforce Black dispossession" (131).
A substantial introduction and first chapter lay out the book's
theoretical framework and basic argument, providing an extensive
overview of competing nineteenth-century models of racialization and
situating them in relation to a wide range of examples of Irish
nationalist racial discourse, painstakingly illustrating the
pervasiveness of the presumption of Irish whiteness. The real
ambivalences of Irish racialization, he shows, were produced by the
ontological instability of whiteness as a category, not by any
widespread doubt as to the place of the Irish within it: "if we're
looking for the date at which the Irish became white, we might look to
the origin of whiteness as a category" (39). This framework enables
O'Malley to revisit a familiar set of textual and visual examples of
nineteenth-century derogatory racializations of the Irish and to show
that, far from reflecting an assumption of Irish non-whiteness, they
relied on precisely the opposite as the basis for their denigration:
"the key aspect of these racialized portraits is the fact that Blackness
is represented as its own insult while Irishness is insulted by being
brought into alignment with it" (49).
Chapter 2, on the Gothic, reads Matthew Gregory Lewis's "The
Anaconda: An East-Indian Tale" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" for
their structuring juxtapositions of Irish and Black experience, which
are shown to rely on a faulty analogy that simultaneously appropriates
and minimizes the particular horrors of slavery. O'Malley points to
Harriet Jacobs's use of the Gothic as a more successful translation,
taking Gothic palimpsest as a register of differences between cultural
sources and translations, rather than a game of illusory identifications
between them.
Chapter 3 reads William Grayson's epic poem of the American South,
"The Hireling and the Slave," as a cynical arrogation of the Irish
Bardic tradition in support of an effort to consolidate American white
supremacy in support of the Slave Power. Grayson "figures the Irish
worker as a paradigmatic instance" of so-called "free white labor"
(106), using Irish liminality to construct a contrastive theory of
peculiarly white rights, and furthermore drawing on the Ossianic model
of formulaic, artificial past-making to naturalize this theory. Further,
Grayson figures American Indianness as a triangulating racial category
that, through its supposed spectral absence, "reduc[es] multiplicity to
dichotomy and, in that reduction, highlight[s] Irish whiteness" (118).
The revivalist model of cultural identity, so powerfully anti-imperial
in a European context, gets ruinously translated in the American context
into a formula for Confederate propaganda.
Chapter 4 reads the early African American novelist Frank J. Webb's
The Garies and Their Friends, as "an important instance of
literary witness to the corporeal and economic terrorism of Irish
whiteness" (132), narrating "the Irish American claim to working-class
whiteness precisely through anti-Black mob violence" (157). O'Malley
presents The Garies as a more successful mode of generic
translation in its refiguration of novelistic realism through the
troping of the ethnographic. This success is marked by Webb's focus on
differentiation. The novel emphasizes the artificiality and socially
constructed nature of all racialization, but shows how this
artificiality actually undergirds (rather than undermining) the
consolidation of white supremacy.
Chapter 5 turns to the Irish nationalist (and Confederate apologist)
John Mitchel, a figure who encapsulates the book's argument in
miniature. Mitchel's enthusiastic embrace of the Confederate cause,
O'Malley argues, was not a confusing failure to apply his liberationist
politics outside of the Irish context, but rather a reflection of the
white supremacism at the heart of those politics--a feature that,
translated across the Atlantic, became more destructive and far more
apparent, but which was consistent across Mitchel's racial politics.
Irish whiteness, for Mitchel, is the very rationale for Irish
liberation; treatment putatively analogous to that of Black people is
formulated as the nature of the anti-Irish injustice. Moreover, O'Malley
shows, Mitchel's American reception reflected a widespread white
Southern alignment with this logic; American antebellum journalism and
polemic readily understood that "Irish Americans in particular might
have a vested interest in this increasing insistence upon the grounding
of citizenship in racial whiteness" (175).
Chapter 6 takes up the Anglo-Irish playwright Dion Boucicault's
plantation melodrama The Octoroon, a play which was
significantly rewritten for different audiences in ways that literalize
O'Malley's framework of generic translation. Boucicault, a famously
chameleonic self-promoter who spoke the language of abolition in the
North and that of apologetics in the South, actually rewrites the play's
ending when it moves across the Atlantic. Different audiences apparently
required a different ratio of sympathy and punishment within
Boucicault's antipolitical cocktail, in which the titular, white-looking
Zoe "has to die because she is Black--[while] the audience should
sympathize with that death because she is white" (210). This kind of
ideological opportunism is further explored in a Coda focused on the
particular work of Irishness in the white supremacism of Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.
This accomplished, persuasive book is particularly important because
it arrives at a moment when crucial scholarly insights about the
constructed and historical nature of race are being strategically
mistranslated by political actors far removed from the halls of academe into
denialism about the reality of racial oppression. O'Malley provides new
frameworks for understanding the significant and multifaceted role of
Irishness in the shifting nineteenth-century transatlantic racial
imaginary through his insightful treatment of a broad array of literary
texts. And in so doing, he powerfully refutes the notion that the
nineteenth-century racialization of Irishness divested it from
entanglement with and participation in whiteness and white
supremacy.
Jacob Romanow
is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Texas,
Austin.
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