IRISH-GA 1085: Black Irish Writing

Posted in Course Offerings, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-06-05 21:09Z by Steven

IRISH-GA 1085: Black Irish Writing

Gluckman Ireland House
New York University
Spring 2010

This course examines the textual force-fields of similarity and difference in the writing of racial and ethnic identities in the Atlantic World.  It begins by considering works of Irish writers who engaged with Atlantic slavery and the sympathetic and testamentary discourses within abolitionism in the late 18th century; authors discussed include Hugh Mulligan, Mary Ledbetter, Edmund Burke, Thomas Brannigan, and Denis Driscoll.  The course then examines the over-lapping traces of radical and revolutionary memory in American slavery and in Irish politics, concentrating on the roles of Irish figures in the writings of Frederick Douglass and Black figures in the writings and speeches of Daniel O’Connell.  The mid-19th century explosion of writing about race and ethnicity following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin will be explored in relation to the many imitations of Stowe’s novel that sought to explain post-famine Ireland.  The course then considers the proliferation of texts that sought to understand the antinomies of desire and prohibition surrounding persons of mixed race, reading works by Mayne Reid, Dion Boucicault, and Charles Chesnutt. Texts that convey the fusion of African-American and Irish cultural forms will be discussed, including Blackface, Minstrelsy, and Dance.  After consideration of the use of race in the development of anti-Irish caricature (via readings of English (Punch) and American (Thomas Nast and the Nativists) cartoonists), the course will conclude by looking at shared and divergent textual and political strategies in writers of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, concentrating on the ambivalence of dialect writing (Finley Peter Dunne, John Synge, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Claude McKay), and the limits of modernist primitivism (Eugene O’Neill’sThe Emperor Jones”).  The course will conclude with a discussion of the politics of memory along and across the color line in contemporary Irish and American public life.  Primary readings will be supplemented by theoretical and critical texts, including works by Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, Eric Lott, Robert Young, Perry Curtis, Marx, Freud, and Foucault.

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