New Modalities of Irishness
An agglomeration of scholarship published mainly in the early 2000s established an interdisciplinary corpus devoted to assessing transnational Irishness. Since that time the devastating impacts of the post-2008 financial crash, which re-oriented Ireland’s place in the global economy and dented its status as a high-performing European success story, played a part in subduing the intellectual interest and cultural excitement around transnational Irishness. More than a decade after the crash and in light of disruptive impacts on national and transnational identities – notably, the COVID-19 pandemic and populist challenges to liberal democracy - it is clear that a re-appraisal of these dynamics is in order.
In an era of heightened self-consciousness in regard to whiteness Irishness toggles between racial positions and performs complex mediations. Of course, Irishness has long held a particular and privileged position among European ethnicities in the US worldview. As Diane Negra has argued “claiming Irishness often authorizes a location and celebration of whiteness in ways that would otherwise be problematic.” In the current era this category may present itself as newly in flux, increasingly divorced from seemingly stable definitions of “heritage,” and available to support new assertions of identity along a racial spectrum.
Now associated with forward social momentum in many respects, Ireland represents a new sort of contrast to a US that for many exhibits recidivist features and is losing its traditional sense of purchase in regard to a positive futurity. Notably, the capacity for Irishness to function as a place marker for ethnic pride and white working-class memory has decisively shifted amidst a new global landscape of intense inequality. Meanwhile Ireland itself is increasingly reckoning with a set of more complex social features as “a country belatedly experiencing the diversification stimulated by globalism.”
The scholarly work referenced above appeared before the onset of the age of social media; today, Irishness flows through key digital channels in myriad forms such as emigration blogs, Instagram posts and TikTok dance videos. Manifestations of Irishness in digital culture may be harder to tease out and require new research protocols to understand.
New Modalities is conceived as an international and interdisciplinary research project and will involve a series of symposia focusing on varied dimensions of Irishness.
