From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
Subject: US Census

Dear Ir-D List Members:

Everybody is agog at the new census findings on multiracial identity, but
there's a bit of hype to the story too. I understand that the Census
Bureau released more findings today, and I hope to check those soon. In
the meantime, here's what I learned from the data for Wisconsin. Of
course, the Badger State is not an area of high minority concentration,
although there are frequent news stories about students from non-white
groups being the fastest increasing component of the school system, etc.

98.75% of the respondents claimed single ethnic group heritage.
1.17% claimed two.
0.07% claimed three.
0.006% claimed more than three.

Of those claiming 1, 91% were white, 6% African-American, 2% Asian, and 1%
American Indian.

Of those claiming 2, 25% were white and American Indian; 23% were white and
Afr-Am; 13% white and Asian; and 22% were white and other
combinations. That makes up 83% of the 1.17%. The white-Asian mix is more
than half the size of the white-AfAm, despite the fact that the Asian
population (in Wisconsin at least) is about one-third the size of the
Af-Am. That may suggest that white-Asian intermarriages are already
relatively more common that white-AfAm ones.

The white and American Indian figures make me suspicious; they are open to
a variety of interpretations, including efforts by whites to claim remote
Indian-American ties for purposes of participation in certain government
benefit. Of course, American Indian and white intermarriage was not
uncommon, and many white Americans who would never been seen by "society"
as Indian claim Native-American lineage. The "others" classification is
also suspect. I have asked (through the Census Bureau website) what were
the most frequent answers that fit in the "others" category and have been
told to expect an answer in a day or two. My guess would be that many of
the responses will not reflect what common usage would describe as "racial"
differences. I expect that some people regularly viewed as white will
report a religion (e.g., Jewish) as a racial category. Some Hispanics, who
can be of any race according to the census, may also have reported
themselves as Hispanics. We'll see.

Tom

From: "C. McCaffrey"
Subject: Re: Ir-D Eirdata

Click on 'register' and then proceed to register yourself. When you fill
in a username and password, of your choice, you are into the system. You
will need to
remember them as you do have to register each time you go in. Well worth a
visit! Good luck.

Carmel

irish-diaspora[at]Bradford.ac.uk wrote:

> From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
> Subject: Restricted Eirdata site
>
> Dear List Members:
>
> I clicked on Bruce Stewart's Eirdata site (Irish-Studies on the Web
> message) but then confronted a request for username and password. Any
> advice?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Tom
>

From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
Subject: Re: Multiracial Option

Re: Marion's Casey's question.

I believe Marion is absolutely right; the Irish were never considered
Negroes in any offficial sense. What we have here is a reporter's reifying
of metaphoric discussions about "How the Irish Became White." I have every
confidence, however, that this assertion will eventually enter popular
memory as a verity. Just like Frederick Douglass's comment about Irish
being worse off than slaves, which is a 180 degree misreading of his actual
statement. (Douglass effectively described the lowly position of the Irish
but then stated that, unlike slaves, they were better off because they at
least were free).

Tom


Thomas J. Archdeacon, Prof. Office: 608-263-1778/1800
Department of History Fax: 608-263-5302
University of Wisconsin -- Madison Home: 608-251-7264
5133 Humanities Building E-Mail:
tjarchde[at]facstaff.wisc.edu
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1483

Forwarded On Behalf Of Mary K Trotter,
Subject: Irish Studies Panel at Midwest MLA


Esteemed Colleagues:

The Midwest Modern Language Association is holding its annual meeting Nov.
1-3, 2001 at the Sheraton City Center in Cleveland, OH. This year's
informal theme is "Translating In and Across Cultures." I have copied the
Irish Studies panel call for papers below. If you are interested in this
panel or have any questions about it, please feel free to contact the
organizer, Victor Mendoza at the address below, or me at matrotte[at]iupui.edu.
For information about M/MLA, or to see other panel proposals, you can reach
the M/MLA website directly at www.uiowa.edu/~mmla/ .


IRISH STUDIES. Epistemology of the (Closeted) Irish. Investigating
historical, cultural, or theoretical significance of "closeted" Irishness of
characters in literary
texts that are explicitly Irish or not.

Victor Mendoza, English, Univ. of
Illinois, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, vrmendoz[at]uiuc.edu

I hope the smart and savvy members of this listserv will consider
contributing their wit to this event.

Slainte,

Mary Trotter
___________________________________
Mary Trotter
Asst. Prof. of English
IUPUI
425 University Blvd.
Indianapolis, IN 46202
Phone: 317-274-8817
FAX: 317-278-1287

From: "Thomas J. Archdeacon"
Subject: Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: For 7 Million People in Census, One
Race Category Isn't Enough

Below is the most recent article from the NYT on the 2000 census.

The curious position of "Hispanic" as a category that some treat as a=20
supra-national ethnicity and some as a race will be interesting to=20
watch. For many American "multiculturalists," the growth of the Hispanic=20
population is the key to projections that the US will at some point in
the=20
21st century become a nation in which whites no longer form the=20
majority. That, of course, makes Hispanics a non-white group (although
the=20
census says Hispanics may belong to any race). Hispanics were often=20
treated as such, especially in the American West and Southwest before the=20
Civil rights Movement. Most Hispanics in the US, however, are
descendants=20
of 20th century arrivals (a large chunk since the 1960s), and, from
another=20
perspective, they may be having an "immigrant" rather than a "racial"=20
experience. The position of Hispanics who do not "look black," may be=20
analogous, in at least some ways, to that of Italians at the beginning of=20
the 20th century. Italians are now seen at the core of the white=20
community. (Comparisons with the Irish in the mid-19th century might
also=20
be made, but I don't think with the same effectiveness, because the=20
quasi-scientific concept of racial differences among Europeans was less=20
articulated then). If Hispanics emerge as the "new Italians," then the=20
projections of the US becoming a concatenation of racial groups=20
collapse. This also hold true if one interprets the intermarriages of=20
Hispanics with whites as a form of ethnic mixing among whites rather than=20
as a harbinger of a new "mixed race."

Perhaps there's a breakthrough in the idea that census categories fail to=20
catch the diversity of people's identities. I have my doubts. The real=20
story may be the choice of the interpretations applied to the data. Of=20
course, historians evaluating an era often find that to be the case.

Tom



>For 7 Million People in Census, One Race Category Isn't Enough
>
>
>By ERIC SCHMITT
>
>WASHINGTON, March 12 =97 Nearly seven million people say they belong to
>more than one race, a small, largely youthful generation of
>multiracial Americans in an increasingly diverse country, data from
>the 2000 census show.
>
> For the first time, Americans were allowed to identify themselves
>as a member of more than one race, choosing from six racial
>categories, an option taken by more than 2 percent of the nation's
>281.4 million people. Demographers said it was a reflection of the
>growing waves of immigrants and interracial marriages in the
>country.
>
> The four most common interracial categories were white and black,
>white and Asian, white and American Indian/Alaska native, and white
>and "some other race," a box that census officials said was checked
>mainly by Latinos. Five percent of blacks, 6 percent of Hispanics,
>14 percent of Asians and 2.5 percent of whites identified
>themselves as multiracial.
>
> According to census figures released today, the nation's Hispanic
>population grew by about 58 percent, and Asians by 48 percent from
>a decade ago, with children younger than 18 making up much of the
>growth.
>
> The data released today were the first broad brush strokes of a
>national portrait that in the coming months will also include
>statistics on age, housing, income, education and ancestry gleaned
>from questionnaires and census interviews.
>
> Today's information filled in the racial and ethnic pieces of a
>shifting national mosaic and carries broad implications for a
>country that in many ways is grappling with how to view itself as
>it enters a new century.
>
> "Obviously, we're moving beyond a black-white paradigm of race,"
>said Sonia M. Perez, a deputy vice president at the National
>Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization. "This also
>challenges the idea of what race is and shows us that people are
>fluid in how they perceive themselves."
>
> These were the highlights of the data:
>
> Almost one in three
>Americans is a member of a minority, compared with one in five in
>1980, with minority defined as anyone not a non-Hispanic white.
>
> The nation's Hispanic population is roughly equal to the
>slower-growing black population as the largest minority.
>
> Thirty-five percent of Latinos are younger than 18, compared with
>24 percent of non-Latinos.
>
> Blacks 17 and younger are nearly four times as likely as blacks 50
>and older to identify themselves as belonging to more than one
>race.
>
> By permitting people to choose an array of racial identities =97
>white, black, Asian, American Indian and Alaska native, Pacific
>islander and Hawaiian native or "some other race" =97 the 2000 census
>presents a matrix of 63 racial categories, compared with 5 a decade
>ago.
>
> The number of Americans who called themselves multiracial is
>relatively small. For instance, 8,637 Americans said they belong to
>five races, and 823 checked all six racial boxes.
>
> Nonetheless, demographers and sociologists said, the more nuanced
>definitions may help break down racial barriers.
>
> "This is a beginning of our having to redefine this social myth
>that we call race and to look at it in a different way than we have
>in the past," said Levonne Gaddy, a social worker in Tucson who is
>president of the Association of Multiethnic Americans. Ms. Gaddy
>said she checked white, black and American Indian.
>
> Indeed, the American Indian category offers one of the more
>interesting glimpses into the census's new racial classification.
>The number of American Indians and Alaska natives who defined
>themselves by only that category grew by 26 percent in the past
>decade to 2.5 million. But when the number of people who said they
>were part Indian were added, the total ballooned to 4.1 million, a
>110 percent increase since 1990.
>
> Dowell Myers, an urban demographer at the University of Southern
>California, said the discrepancy between the two groups illustrated
>pride in a native American heritage and the fact that American
>Indians had had centuries to intermarry with other groups.
>
> Because all who said they belonged to more than one racial group
>were counted separately in each of the six categories, the sum of
>all of these groups far exceeded 100 percent of the population.
>
> Because of this, data from the 2000 census are not directly
>comparable with previous census figures.
>
> Even as some proponents of the new census praised its ability to
>capture a more detailed racial and ethnic picture, Mr. Myers and
>some other critics voiced concern that the process might
>inadvertently harm efforts to help minorities.
>
> "Making the categories fuzzy makes it hard to track progress of
>racial groups over time, particularly in the areas of education,
>occupations and incomes," Mr. Myers said.
>
> At a news conference today, Census Bureau officials were pelted
>with questions about the value of the category "some other race."
>
> The officials acknowledged that 97 percent of the 15.4 million
>people who checked the "some other race" box were Hispanics who
>ignored requests by federal officials to indicate their Hispanic
>origin in the ethnic category, not racial category.
>
> "Hispanic" is a catch-all term designed to cover an array of
>Spanish- speaking people. In the federal statistical system, ethnic
>origin is considered separate from race.
>
> Census officials acknowledged they might have been mistaken to
>include a "some other race" box, when people already could pick
>more than one race.
>
> "Some people think it muddied the waters; some people think it
>helped in collecting information," said Jorge del Pinal, assistant
>chief of the Census Bureau's population division. "A lot of people
>were frustrated if they didn't find a category that they're
>interesting in reporting in."
>
> But Claudette Bennett, chief of the Census Bureau's racial
>statistics branch, was blunter: "With 50-50 hindsight, after we
>went with the `mark-one-or-more' construction to the race question,
>we probably should have taken the `some other race' box off of the
>questionnaire."
>
> Even so, experts say there is no disputing some of the reasons
>that give the United States a more diverse hue. Ms. Bennett said
>interracial unions, including marriages and domestic partnerships,
>increased to two million in 1990 from 500,000 in 1970, using the
>latest statistics available.
>
> The multiracial mix varies not only by age group, but also by
>states, which have varying histories of assimilation. In New
>Jersey, for instance, 2.5 percent of the population said they
>belonged to more than one race; in Mississippi, only 0.7 percent
>said they were multiracial.
>
> Douglas J. Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise
>Institute, a conservative research organization, published research
>in the last two years showing that about 1 in 10 black men marries
>a white woman, slightly higher than the ratio of black women who
>marry white men.
>
> Mr. Besharov said his study also found that black and white
>couples today were more likely to have children than biracial
>couples in past decades, who tended to marry late or after failed
>earlier marriage.
>
> "Parents today feel the climate won't be as difficult for their
>children," Mr. Besharov said.
>
>
>
>
>
>

Thomas J. Archdeacon, Prof. Office: 608-263-1778/1800
Department of History Fax: 608-263-5302
University of Wisconsin -- Madison Home: 608-251-7264
5133 Humanities Building E-Mail:=20
tjarchde[at]facstaff.wisc.edu
Madison, Wisconsin

From: DanCas1[at]aol.com
Subject: Re: Giant Blind Albino Crocodiles

A Chairde:

Let me chime in and second T. J. Archdeacon's seconding of Marion Casey.
The
Irish (people born in Ireland) were never considered "Negro" or "Black" or
"Colored" or "African" in North America in any "official" governmental sense
in anyway at anytime. Not even in Boston or Brooklyn.

However, it is true that under the British/American One Drop Rule (so
enamored of by the Segregationist Old Right of yesterday and the
Neoracialist
Identity "Left" of today) those persons of predominantly Irish stock or
parentage who had any amount of African blood would be classified as
"colored," or "black," or "mulatto," in 19th and 20th century US Federal
censuses.

Parenthetically, I have found two people born in Ireland, one of them a
substantial businessman, classified as "mulatto" in the 1870 NYC census; and
one girl, age 16, born in Ireland, classified as "black" in the 1850
Brooklyn
census. (Her name, by the way, is Mary Casey; I kid you not.)

Nevertheless, this irritating assertion (or "urbane" myth) that the Irish in
N.
America were officially classified as "Negro" or "Black" is now circulated
and cited with a frequency and confidence only surpassed by its double first
cousin: the spurious Spanish Armada/Black Irish Myth. In Brooklyn Cassidy
Cant these are referred to as "Gibacs" for the mythic Giant Blind Albino
Crocodiles of the NYC City sewer system. All New Yorkers of a certain age,
as
well as scholars of the circus, Tom Pynchon aficionados, and Cornell alumni,
will understand the reference immediately.

Daniel Cassidy

From: "C. McCaffrey"
Subject: Re: Giant blind albino crocodiles

Daniel Cassidy wrote:
Nevertheless, this irritating assertion (or "urbane" myth) that the
Irish in
N.America were officially classified as "Negro" or "Black" is now
circulated
and cited with a frequency and confidence only surpassed by its double
first
cousin: the spurious Spanish Armada/Black Irish Myth.


Thanks you so much for this Daniel. I agree absolutely. I am
confronted with these idiotic myths on an almost weekly basis from
students and American friends and am so tired of fighting these
dragons. That Spanish Armada one really beats Bannagher - it drives me
crazy.
Carmel

Forwarded for Information...

From: Anne Shepherd

PLEASE NOTE: The Author's Response follows next.

Reviews in History

Ireland and Empire
Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000.
ISBN 0-19-820825-1

Stephen Howe

Reviewed by: Patrick Maume
Queen's University Belfast

Many writers attribute Ireland's problems to colonialism. Most, however,
make only limited reference to literature on colonialism elsewhere, and
debate is hampered by the intimacy of the Irish academic and intellectual
scene, which means criticism is muffled by tact or excessively
personalised.

Stephen Howe summarises this literature in a survey uncompromising in
praise and criticism. In his early chapters, Howe surveys the history of
relations between Britain and Ireland. Employing a modernist theory of
nationalism and favouring the archipelagic model of mediaeval and early
modern Ireland rather than its "internal colonialist" rival, he argues
that until the early modern era it is questionable how far "England" as an
entity existed, or whether there was an "Ireland" to be conquered. He
finds the colonial parallel more applicable to the systematic conquests
and plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but of
doubtful value thereafter; there was persistent ambiguity about whether
Ireland was a kingdom or a colony, and even when administrators propounded
a colonial agenda their ability to implement it was limited. Howe's
central point is that British rule in Ireland was always limited and
mediated by heterogeneous interests, rather than an omnipotent coloniser
reshaping a helpless Other.

Howe notes that Irish nationalist sympathy for the victims of empire was
usually selective and based on opportunistic support for Britain's
enemies. (This is correct, though exceptions are more significant than
Howe realises. Enlightenment-inspired United Irish leaders of the 1790s
extensively compared the plight of the Irish to that of black slaves -
though defeated United Irishmen who fled to the southern states of America
often changed their views. (1) R.R. Madden, mid-century historian of the
United Irishmen, was an active abolitionist who gave crucial evidence in
the Amistad trial.) Many nationalists anxiously distinguished themselves
from supposedly pre- political "savages"; some were avowed racists. The
Young Irelander John Mitchel denounced British exploitation of India and
celebrated Afghan defeat of the British (2); Mitchel also advocated
enslavement of blacks and declared that the crowning indignity of
Britain's oppression of Ireland was its infliction upon white men (p.44;
Howe is too lenient to Mitchel). Howe argues that British resistance to
Home Rule reflected fear of the break-up of the United Kingdom rather than
the empire, and this died away even within the Conservative Party as the
twentieth century progressed. Howe qualifies this view of the Home Rule
debate (perhaps it needs further qualification) and his view that
Conservative Unionism died with Ian Gow is slightly exaggerated. (3) He is
stronger when pointing out that most anti-colonial writers tacitly
excluded Ireland from their subject, as do most historians of empire.

A chapter on Irish historians discusses the teleological nationalist
historical tradition and its partial supersession by professionalised
historians associated with the journal Irish Historical Studies and by the
outspoken "revisionism" of writers like Conor Cruise O'Brien. Howe finds
both insufficiently concerned with comparative perspectives and criticises
the excessive positivism of the scholars, but thinks this preferable to
"even more methodologically retrograde" anti-revisionists, who also assume
"Irish exceptionalism" and sometimes demand an usable past irrespective of
its truth.

Howe then explores popular Unionist historical consciousness, making
enterprising use of ephemera such as the Orange Standard and Ulster
Review. "Anti-revisionists" find counterparts in Ian Adamson and Michael
Hall's attempt to base a common Ulster identity on alleged descent from
the Cruthin, a pre-Celtic people. Howe correctly cites archaeologists'
declarations that the Cruthin are culturally invisible. For Adamson, who
admires the fantasies of C.S. Lewis (another native of North Down) the
Cruthin roffer escape from political and cultural frustration into a
heroic past. For Hall the Cruthin, because of their invisibility,
represent the silent ordinary people past and present; his working-class
ancestors in East Belfast, the present-day populations of republican and
loyalist areas where he organises "think-tanks" of community workers,
publishing the results. Hall's work for reconciliation is admirable, but
the myth that drives it is false.

At the heart of this book lies a polemic against writers who present
colonialism in cultural terms with little or no reference to material
factors, who stretch the term to cover almost any form of domination or
exploitation, who base sweeping generalisations on limited and partial
readings of a few literary texts. His principal targets are writers
associated with the Derry-based Field Day collective. Howe complains that
these writers employ sophisticated theoretical apparatus to serve a
simplistic interpretation of the Irish situation, that their definitions
are so wide they are meaningless, and flaws and contradictions in their
arguments are glossed over by postmodernist refusal to distinguish between
myth and fact and assertions that when their version of "liberatory"
discourse attains universal hegemony all will be reconciled and opposition
will automatically cease to exist. (This ominously resembles the
Dostoevskyan provincial intellectual hoping for universal liberty but
impelled by his own logic to advocate universal slavery.)

Howe complains about their failure to define colonialism, which they
present as an omnipresent Cartesian demon, and their refusal to engage
with Ulster Unionism, a denial of the "otherness" which they invoke. Howe
takes up Francis Mulhern's point that Field Day's view of Ireland is
centered on Derry and dismisses the experience of the Republic as
secondary to conflict with Britain. This should not imply that Derry
experience is inauthentic, though Howe should acknowledge how this
nationalist/republican view of the British state in Northern Ireland as
active contributor to the conflict rather than neutral and reasonable
guarantor reflects security force activities in the early 1970s and the
limitations of direct rule. The Derry viewpoint also influences Field
Day's view of Northern Ireland; partition appears purely oppressive and
irrational more easily if Derry with its lost Donegal hinterland and
longstanding repression of a local Catholic majority through
gerrymandering, rather than Belfast and Protestant-majority East Ulster,
is taken as paradigmatic.

Not all Howe's specific criticisms here are correct. Luke Gibbons may not
offer direct citations for his interpretation of Burke's celebration of
tradition as congruent with postmodern multiculturalism, but it is a
plausible reading, and Gibbons' emphasis on the resurgence of certain
traditionalisms in 1980s Ireland can be read as a statement that modernity
will not arrive automatically but must be actively created and adapted.
(p.126) Nonetheless, Howe is correct to point out the drawbacks of
arguments which valorise "oppositional kinds of nationalism;
decentralised, non-hierarchical, even anarchic, fragmentary and fugitive
in expression, associated with peasant, proletarian, female, local and
minority resistances (p.133)". Historians of agrarian violence and modern
paramilitarism (loyalist and republican) show that while such "resistance"
is often an embryonic form of political expression, it can also manifest
as cruel, arbitrary and self-serving violence against neighbours and local
rivals rather than external oppressors. Howe's reminder that for all
their limitations the "conservative" founders of the southern Irish state
averted the populist chaos and bloody dictatorships which consumed many
newly independent states, and that victory for their "radical" opponents
might have produced such horrors rather than the "liberatory" Utopia of
retrospective postmodernist dreams (pp236-7), is well taken. (4) (It should
be noted that in Ireland and elsewhere, centralised administration often
serves as a check on predatory local vested interests.) (5)

The next chapters, on attributions of the Irish Republic's problems to
neocolonial dependency and interpretations of the Northern Ireland
conflict as anti-colonial, display painful examples of false prophecies
and simplistic rhetoric. In the South, dependency theorists and economic
nationalists explained the failure of protectionism by claiming it did not
go far enough, while attributing to colonialism economic and social
problems shared with most advanced industrial countries and predicting
indefinite stagnation a shortly before a sustained economic boom. Many
socialists in the 1970s and 1980s uncritically equated the Northern
conflict with colonial wars elsewhere, even hinting Ulster Unionists
should leave like Algerian colons. Some feminists presented all
conservative and patriarchal elements of Irish life as colonial legacies
which would vanish with IRA victory, uttering pseudo-traditionalist
denunciations of feminists who disagreed.

Howe surveys Ulster Unionism, duly sceptical towards claims by "liberal
unionists" like Arthur Aughey that the Britishness with which Unionists
identify is inherently modern and multicultural. Howe argues that while
Ulster Unionists supported the empire this was on the same terms as the
rest of Britain, rather than as a separate settler community. He finds
present-day Unionism fragmented, confused, often sectarian, but not a mere
creation of British policy. After discussing James Loughlin's suggestion
that Ulster Unionism is a British "Northern" regional identity, he favours
Frank Wright's view that while the problem was shaped by the
nineteenth-century decay of older colonial structures, Northern Ireland is
an ethnic frontier rather than a settler colony. Howe concludes by
arguing that colonialism is only part of the complex Irish experience,
which has much in common with eastern and southern Europe. He appeals for
transcendence of divisions through scholarly understanding and social
democracy.

No survey so wide-ranging could be flawless, and reviews, like surveys,
must to a large extent be reactive. Howe's details are more easily
criticised than his framework. He is sometimes unduly dismissive towards
individual commentators. He accuses Catherine Candy's article on the
Irish-born Theosophist Margaret Cousins (1878- 1954) of failing "to
demonstrate that Cousins was at all involved in nationalist politics in
Ireland or India" (p.49). Cousins' Irish political sympathies were
nationalist though her main involvement was suffragist, and she was indeed
active in the Indian nationalist movement. (6) Howe's criticism of Gearoid
O
Crualaoich's defence of myth is misplaced (p.144) O Crualaoich, a
folklorist, is not presenting as myth superior to reason but pointing out
that it can convey meaning.

Howe's account of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland too easily
shades into wholesale dismissal of nationalist viewpoints. Liberalism and
social democracy may resolve the Northern Ireland problem; it is still
necessary to explain why, despite benefits conferred by Liberal reforms,
many nineteenth-century Irish nationalists specifically repudiated
liberalism as a hypocritical mask for patronage and power, why labourism
failed to overcome sectarianism under Stormont. Domination and
exploitation may not be colonial and still rankle; one does not have to
substitute myth for reason to respect and decipher the unfamiliar and
sometimes unpalatable idioms in which the maimed tried to express their
situation. Mitchel's claim that the Great Famine was a premeditated act
of genocide is unsustainable, and the incongruity between his advocacy of
Irish liberty and African enslavement has always jarred, but his angry
anti-liberal rhetoric seemed to many Irish nationalists in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explain something about the
condition of Ireland they experienced.

Howe's account of Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein (pp44-8, 250n1),
reproduces flaws in the literature for which I am partly responsible.
Griffith's pamphlet Pitt's Policy, often cited as claiming Ireland should
share the British Empire, tried to disprove by comparison with the actual
state of affairs Unionist arguments that Ireland benefited from
incorporation in the United Kingdom; it does not represent Griffith's own
views. Griffith saw Mitchel's racism as irrelevant to his stature as an
Irish nationalist, but did not endorse it (though he shared Mitchel's
anti-Semitism); his early journalism contains impassioned denunciations of
British atrocities against the Matabele (though he ignored similar
atrocities by Afrikaners). Vincent Tucker's view of Griffith as prototype
for Third World anti-colonial socialists (p.62) rests on the same
misunderstanding as similar claims for earlier figures. Like his
eighteenth and nineteenth-century precursors, Griffith believed an
independent Ireland would replace British-sustained structures of
privilege and patriotism by egalitarian citizenship and economic
nationalism would spread prosperity. His historiographical misfortune was
to clash with socialists who emphasised his faults while misunderstanding
earlier figures who shared his outlook as precursors of their own. (7)

In criticising Gibbons' claim that the national-Marxist James Connolly was
influenced by economic nationalist arguments, Howe dismisses Connolly as
uncritically reliant on romantic nationalist historians (p.63). This
understates Connolly's originality; his Labour in Irish History (1910)
challenges economic nationalists (anticipating modern economic historians)
by arguing that pre-Union economic growth derived from the Industrial
Revolution rather than the Irish Parliament, and that a non-socialist
Irish state would serve the Irish bourgeoisie rather than the general
interest. (The nationalist economic historian George O'Brien tried
unsuccessfully to refute Connolly, fearing this "would deprive the Irish
nation of one great argument in favour of the restoration of its
parliamentary liberty".) (8)

Howe discusses the Irish Republic in terms of the failures of economic
nationalism and dependency theory; more should be said about its cultural
debates to explain why many southern intellectuals emphasise modernisation
rather than colonialism. This gap reflects Howe's over-ready assumption
that Irish nationalists were historically concerned with state power and
cultural determinism is a recent development. In fact the 1880s and 1890s
produced a cultural nationalism which reacted to perceived limitations of
parliamentary politics by arguing that cultural self-confidence was
necessary for political and economic revival, and in trying to work the
British system the Irish unwittingly abandoned the sources of their
strength. This drew on older critiques by Irish Tories who reacted to
Irish nationalists and British reformers by posing as defenders of local
pieties and opposing to universalist reformism a projected national
culture reconciling all Irish classes and creeds to the status quo; a
project partly co-opted by nationalist intellectuals like Davis who
substituted nationalism as the basis of cultural reconciliation. (Knapp's
view that Lady Gregory's primitivism reflected social conservatism as well
as cultural nationalism (p.144) is less implausible than Howe suggests.)

The romantic Tory and Gaelic revivalist Standish O'Grady complained that
scholarly historians ignored heroic virtues visible to the synthesising
eye of the artist; this philosophy was adopted by the cultural nationalist
Daniel Corkery, who attacked "scientific" history as futile sifting of
colonial archives and conceived his study of the eighteenth-century Gaelic
poetic tradition as a national epic of "Land, Nationalism, and Religion".
(This resembles recent anti-revisionist critiques.) Some political
nationalists saw culturalism as mystification distracting attention from
statehood, but it was significant in the Literary Revival and the
Irish-language movement and retrospectively perceived as inspiring the
rebels of 1916-23. A version became the official ideology of the newly
independent state, cited to justify various forms of social repression,
and devastatingly attacked by consciously realist and modernist
intellectuals such as Conor Cruise O'Brien. (Much twentieth-century
scholarship celebrates the bureaucratic rationality of the civil service
as saviour from the self-serving fantasies of political activists.) Many
southern intellectuals thus accuse neo-nationalist cultural theorists of
reviving a failed past, while some theorists' contortions reflect attempts
to explain neo-traditionalism as externally imposed distortion of a valid
project.

Howe's account of Unionism misses intriguing undercurrents. He overlooks
a development which devastated Unionist self-confidence and
self-perception; sections of the upper and upper-middle classes which
formerly provided leadership and were associated with a "British" as
distinct from "Ulster" ethos have dropped out of active political
involvement (because of the erosion of the regional economic base which
underpinned their power, and increasing distance between the metropolitan
"Britishness" with which they identify and the "Ulster Britishness" of
traditional Unionism.) The gap has been filled by more provincial figures
and emphasis on Ulster- Scots traditions associated with Presbyterianism.
This provides a history of disadvantage and anti-establishment protest
which fits present-day discontent and provides rhetorical counterweight to
nationalist accounts of their own oppression; it is also more reminiscent
of sentimental nineteenth-century "kailyard" literature than of
contemporary Scotland, and weakened by withdrawal of the institutional
support which mainstream Presbyterianism provided to earlier
manifestations. Ulster-Scots revivalism produced the only significant
bicentennial Unionist reinterpretation of the 1798 Rising, overlooked by
Howe. David Hume, a local historian from Ballycarry in East Antrim (a
centre of United Irish activity in 1798), active in the "cultural
Unionist" Ulster Society and Ulster-Scots revival projects, presents the
rising as reflecting specifically Scots-Presbyterian radicalism renewed in
tenant-farmer and Independent Orange protest movements of the early
twentieth century. (9)

Howe overlooks instances where contemporary defenders of Unionism come
from Catholic/nationalist backgrounds (notably Rory Fitzpatrick, author of
God's Frontiersmen (p.102) and many British and Irish Communist
Organisation writers associated with the intellectually-eccentric Brendan
Clifford (pp178-80), a secularist from a Southern Catholic rural
background, who after advocating "two nations" theory and electoral
integration reverted to a pro-republican viewpoint in the early 1990s.) (10)

These shortcomings reflect gaps in the literature. Much remains to be
done; Howe rightly calls for Irish scholars to expand their comparative
range, "inserting Irish history, including... its radical, socialist and
feminist movements, into the myriad stories of the North Atlantic
archipelago [J.G.A. Pocock's name for the former British Isles], of
Europe, of the Atlantic world ...[into] a genuinely rather than
rhetorically comparative colonial and postcolonial historiography"
(p.145). He deserves commendation for addressing his subjects and readers
as equals rather than mystified puppets or keepers of ineffable mysteries,
and for sharpening the tools of our labours.

March 2001


NOTES:

1. David A. Wilson United Irishmen in the United States: Immigrant Radicals
In The Early Republic (Cornell University Press, 1998) pp133-40.

2. John Mitchel Jail Journal (New York, 1854).

3. It ignores the linking by sections of the Tory Right of compromise in
Northern Ireland with European union as threats to British sovereignty
(e.g. Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain
(London, 1999; rev.ed. 2000) pp331-2, 337, 358-62), though this has very
restricted political leverage.

4. Tom Garvin 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996).

5. Mary Daly The Buffer State: The Historical Roots of the Department of
the Environment (Dublin, 1997) pp297-320.

6. James and Margaret Cousins We Two Together (Madras, 1950); Kumari
Jayawardena the White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia
during British Rule (Routledge, New York, 1995);
surodaya.org.dharma/h.htm

7. Brian Maye Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1997); Patrick Maume The Long
Gestation: Irish Nationalist Political Life 1891-1918 (Dublin, 1999);
ibid. "Arthur Griffith, Young Ireland, and Republican Ideology: The
Question of Continuity" Eire-Ireland 34, 2.

8. George O'Brien Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century
(Dublin & London, 1918) pp2-3, 304-5, 397-406.

9. David Hume To Right Some Things That We Thought Wrong... The Spirit of
1798 and Presbyterian Radicalism in Ulster (Ulster Society, Lurgan,
1998).

10.Clifford has always seen Northern Ireland as an unviable political
entity; having failed to secure its full integration into the UK he
advocated integration into a modernised Irish Republic. His earlier
work influenced later universalist, as distinct from particularist,
theorisations of Ulster Unionism.



+--------------------------------------------------+
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|"Reviews in History" |
|Institute of Historical Research |
|School of Advanced Study |
|Malet Street |
|London WC1E 7HU |
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Forwarded for information...

From: Anne Shepherd

Reviews in History

Ireland and Empire Oxford University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-19-820825-1

Stephen Howe

Reviewed by: Dr. Patrick Maume Queen's University Belfast

Author's Response: Dr. Stephen Howe Ruskin College, Oxford.

Patrick Maume's comments on my book are both generous and challenging -
which is
a rarer combination of qualities in a reviewer than one might wish. I am
indebted to him for his care and courtesy. As he says, Ireland and Empire,
as a
wide-ranging survey, is in great part reacting to (and sometimes against) a
pre-existing secondary literature `and reviews, like surveys, must to a
large
extent be reactive'. Part of my response, by the same token, must react to
the
reaction to the reaction: though in conclusion, I shall try to raise some
broader, and less abjectly inter-textual, issues.

Maume deftly and accurately summarises the book's main themes, before
proceeding
to some specific suggestions and criticisms. The positive suggestions are
all
illuminating, and genuinely helpful. He is surely right to say that my work
tends to lament rather than adequately to explain the successive failures of
Radical-Liberalism and Labourism in Ireland, and especially in the North.
More
specifically, the appeal of anti-liberal rhetoric (as expressed in its most
extreme forms by figures like John Mitchel - toward whom, perhaps
surprisingly,
Maume thinks me `too lenient') to many Irish nationalists needs further
exploration. Commentators have tended either to take it for granted as a
natural, even desirable, aspect of anti-British cultural renewal, or to
regard
it as something inexplicably deplorable and retrograde. Maume may well be
correct, too, in suggesting that Arthur Griffith's complex and
rapidly-changing
ideas deserve more sympathetic appraisal: though he is unduly
self-deprecatory
in attributing unfairly hostile judgements on Griffith partly to the
influence
of his own earlier work. Similarly, I must concur with Maume that my brief
discussion of James Connolly's historical writings understates their
originality. I was, no doubt, overreacting against the near-canonisation of
Connolly so widely encountered, especially on the Irish left. In relation to
the
more recent politics of Northern Ireland, it is undoubtedly fair to say that
the
withdrawal of so much of the middle and upper classes from local political
life
has been a more significant phenomenon than I had allowed for - although I
did
not entirely neglect it. More attention might also be given, as Maume
suggests,
to various intriguing ideological crosscurrents in contemporary northern
Irish
life, including the `defenders of Unionism.from Catholic/nationalist
backgrounds' whom he mentions. I'm not sure, however, that it is quite fair
to
say I `overlook' these - several of the individuals concerned are discussed
quite extensively in the book, as are some figures who have `crossed over'
in
the other direction, and indeed my Acknowledgements page may hint how
important
some of these have been to my thinking. Nor am I quite certain that it is
necessarily discreditable to admire C.S. Lewis, or even to enjoy Scottish
`kailyard' novelists, as Maume seems to imply. (Personally, I've long had a
certain sneaking regard for S.R. Crockett, if only on the `so-bad-it's-good'
principle).

On a broader issue, the relationship between culturalism and statism in
Irish
nationalist thought, Maume also has important things to say, some modifying
and
some supplementing my abbreviated (and, perhaps, over-polemical) account,
and
drawing on his own major recent work The Long Gestation. I regret that the
latter appeared too late for me to make use of it. I regret almost as much
my
failure to discuss David Hume`s intriguing little book on the United
Irishmen,
to which Maume refers, either in Ireland and Empire or in my History
Workshop
article on commemorations of the 1798 rising. [1]

Maume's argument that there is a need `to respect and decipher the
unfamiliar
and sometimes unpalatable idioms in which the maimed tried to express their
situation' is well taken. I had tried to explore some of the dilemmas
involved
here in a previous book and associated writings on visions of the African
past.
[2] Quite possibly a desire not to repeat myself resulted in my not being
sufficiently explicit about these dilemmas in the Irish context. I did,
however,
signal clearly that my too-brief critical discussion of Irish nationalists'
attitudes to international, colonial and racial questions did not intend to
suggest that these were unusually reprehensible, but rather that (contrary
to
much subsequent myth-making) they were very similar to those of radicals and
of
small-nation nationalists elsewhere in Europe: similar not least in their
inconsistencies and their racially-inflected occlusions. I really don't feel
that this `too easily shades into wholesale dismissal of nationalist
viewpoints', as Maume suggests: though he is right to say that there were
more
exceptions than I allowed for, not least among the United Irishmen of the
1790s.

As to specific criticisms, I am in a sense surprised - and naturally
pleased -
that Patrick Maume did not identify more errors of fact or judgement than he
did, especially in relation to late 19th- and early-20th century Irish
politics.
Few if any historians are better equipped to tug at my loose threads or
qualify
my over-hasty generalisations than is Maume. One or two of his remarks,
however,
may have slightly misinterpreted what I had written. I did not, for
instance,
say that Tory Unionism died with Ian Gow. That would indeed have been an
exaggerated, if not downright false, claim - as a reading of almost any
weekend's Sunday Telegraph will confirm. In context, the comment related
specifically to parliamentary politics, and my claim was that Gow was the
last
`really influential and able' supporter of a traditional kind of Unionism in
the
Commons. Peter Hitchens, whom Maume cites in contradiction, is not an MP or
a
party-political figure as such, and opinions might differ as to whether he
is
`really influential and able', for all the eloquence of his laments at Old
England's passing. Gearoid O Crualaoich does not, indeed, proclaim that myth
is
superior to reason - nor did I suggest that he does so - but the argument he
presents is more far-reaching, and in my view more vulnerable, than the
bland
and unexceptionable notion that myth can convey meaning. I did not criticise
James F. Knapp for attributing Lady Gregory's primitivism to social
conservatism, but for deriving it from her supposed position as `both
colonizer
and colonized', as an instance of what is by now a routine, cliched
application
of colonial discourse theory to Irish literary works.

Maume begins his review by pointing out that the intimacy of Irish
intellectual
life often means that criticism is either `muffled by tact or excessively
personalised'. He suggests that Ireland and Empire is by contrast
`uncompromising in praise and criticism'. I take this as a compliment,
though a
slightly edgy one. I had myself noted how `explosions of rage are lurking,
barely concealed, beneath the surface of much of the writing we are
examining'.
It is tempting, if potentially rather self-indulgent, to ruminate on how
receptions of one's own work relate to such patterns. Certainly not all have
been as calm or judicious as Maume's. Although Ireland and Empire is, in
part,
unabashedly polemical, and although responses to my previous work have made
me
no stranger to controversy, I have been surprised by how angry, indeed
`excessively personalised', some reactions have been. Unexpected, also, was
the
extent to which Unionist commentators have in the main liked the book more
than
nationalist ones have seemed to do: for whatever the book is, it is not
`Unionist' in sympathies. Less surprising is that hostile responses have
come
mainly from literary and cultural critics, positive ones from historians,
sociologists and political analysts; and that the angriest (indeed in my
view
maliciously distorting) reaction so far has come not from Ireland or Britain
but
from New York.

A final thought, which may be ungenerous or at best premature: as Maume
rightly
says, much of the impetus behind my book and associated articles [3] was to
urge
the value of comparative analysis of the Irish past. None of the responses I
have so far read, including even Maume's, takes up this challenge.
Assumptions
of Irish exceptionalism - often mirroring, as I have suggested, the yet
older
and stronger ideology of the `peculiarities of the English' - continue to be
the
reigning orthodoxy. One of the paradoxes of my subject is that analyses of
Ireland as `colonial' or `postcolonial' have tended to reinforce rather than
modify such intellectual habits.

March 2001

1.'Speaking of '98: History, Politics and Memory in the Bicentenary of the
1798
United Irish Uprising' History Workshop Journal 47 (1999). I suspect,
however,
that Hume's work has not circulated far outside Lurgan - it does not appear
even
to be listed or stocked by its publisher, the Ulster Society. The point
Maume
extracts from it, on the specifically Scots-Presbyterian roots of 1790s
radicalism in eastern Ulster, has been well made also in more widely
accessible
works by A.T.Q. Stewart and Ian McBride.

2. Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London 1998); `L'Afrique
comme sublime objet d'ideologie' in Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et.al.
(eds.), Afrocentrismes: L'histoire des Africains entre Egypte et Amerique
(Paris
2000).

3. For instance, `The Politics of Historical "Revisionism": Comparing
Ireland
and Israel/Palestine' Past and Present 168 (2000).



+--------------------------------------------------+
|Anne Shepherd - Deputy Editor |
| |
|"Reviews in History" |
|Institute of Historical Research |
|School of Advanced Study |
|Malet Street |
|London WC1E 7HU |
|020-7862-8787 |
| |
|email: ashepher[at]ihr.sas.ac.uk |
| |
| NEW SIMPLER URL ADDRESS !! |
| |
| SEE "Reviews in History" on: |
| http://www.history.ac.uk |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------+

The following item has been brought to our attention...

From NYTimes.com

Multiracial Identification Might Affect Programs


By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, March 13 ? The surprisingly large multiracial response on
the 2000 census could have major implications for monitoring and
enforcing civil rights, tracking poverty, ensuring racial balance
in public schools and providing aid to minorities, sociologists and
federal officials said today.

Civil rights advocates say the new figures could expand the number
of people covered under civil rights laws, but that in turn could
increase the number of legal challenges claiming the nation's
minority population was improperly inflated.

At the Health and Human Services Department, officials responsible
for providing health care on or near Indian reservations ponder
whether they should plan to care for the 2.6 million people who
identified themselves exclusively as American Indians or the 4.1
million people who said they were at least part Native American.

And the Education Department is already girding to revamp how it
tracks pupil enrollment and student progress in reading, writing
and science by race. "I can see it gets a little bit fuzzier," said
W. Vance Grant, a statistics specialist at the Education
Department.

The new information and the corresponding issues it raises
illustrate the consequences of the decision by the Office of
Management and Budget to allow people for the first time to
identify themselves on census forms as members of more than one
race. People could choose from six racial categories, which present
a matrix of 63 possible racial choices, compared with 5 a decade
ago.

But the new options mean that data from the 2000 census is not
directly comparable with information from previous censuses or with
other statistical systems that use the traditional racial
categories.

Roderick J. Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the
Census Bureau, said tracking vital statistics like birth and death
records by race could be skewed if data from both counting systems
were intermingled.

"Multiple-race data are going to be particularly hard to collect
and collect consistently across different collections systems,"
said Mr. Harrison, the director of data for the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, a research organization that
specializes in minority issues.

Data from the 2000 census released on Monday produced some
surprises. For example, nearly two million black Americans say they
belong to more than one race, more than what many government
demographers and civil rights officials had projected based on
surveys in 1996 and 1998.

Census officials said they were at a loss to explain exactly why 5
percent of black people, or about double what had been expected,
said they were multiracial. About half of that group, or 784,000
people, said they were white and black.

"We really didn't expect that number," Claudette Bennett, the
chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau, said in
an interview today. "We just don't really have a good handle on it
right now."

As a result, the Census Bureau plans to survey 50,000 households
this summer to find out who identified themselves as belonging to
more than one race and why, Ms. Bennett said. She said the survey
would be conducted from a nationally representative sample of all
races.

Some experts attribute the larger number of blacks identifying
with more than one race to an increase in interracial marriages and
a greater recognition by younger blacks of their multiracial
ancestry.

And some civil rights advocates, citing the history of race mixing
among African-Americans in this country, say the numbers of self-
identified multiracial blacks should not be that startling.

"I don't think that's significant," Kweisi Mfume, president of the
N.A.A.C.P. "Quite frankly, it's an expression by people of their
mixed ancestry."

In any case, the new data underscores that race is an elastic
concept that changes depending on when, how and where you ask the
question: What race are you?

A University of Michigan study in 1995 found that when 20,000
adolescents of all races were asked about their racial identity,
about 7 percent said they were mixed race when asked in an
anonymous survey at school. But when asked at home by an
interviewer, often with a parent present, only 3.5 percent of the
children said they were mixed race.

"Your identity is a dance between what you think you are and what
other people think you are," said Prof. David R. Harris, a
University of Michigan sociologist who conducted the survey.

Thirty years ago, Professor Harris said, social norms dictated
that a person was a minority if he had "one drop" of minority blood
in his background. "Nowadays, kids see Mariah Carey, Derek Jeter or
Tiger Woods, and they're much more likely to see themselves as
mixed race rather than simplify it in the old one-drop way," he
said.

As the nation looks at its racial makeup more carefully, the
self-examination is taking place family by family. Take Terri Ann
Lowenthal's 11-year-old daughter, Joelle, for instance. Ms.
Lowenthal is white; the child's father is black. When Joelle was
born, Ms. Lowenthal checked "black" for her race on the 1990
census.

For this decennial count, Ms. Lowenthal, a private census
consultant and former staff director of the House Subcommittee on
the Census, said the family talked about the issue and left it up
to Joelle, who checked both black and white.

Some sociologists and demographers say it may be only a matter of
time before the traditional racial classifications lose currency.

"Over time," said Hugh B. Price, president of the National Urban
League, "we may see those categories lose their salience as a more
complex picture emerges."


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/14/national/14CENS.html?pagewanted=2?ex=98559
0784&ei=1&en=d29f0d4389660e6f

Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the
most authoritative news coverage on the Web,
updated throughout the day.

Become a member today! It's free!

http://www.nytimes.com?eta


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Forwarded for information, from the Gypsy Council...

Hi, this is a message from the Gypsy Council.
We are going all out to take part in the
"March of 100,000" which is a linked up
series of rallies and demonstrations in l50
towns and cities around the world on
ROMA NATION DAY, Sunday, 8 April.

Our rally in Parliament Square will bring together
people from all parts of the growing Gypsy
community, Romanichals, Irish Travellers and
newly arrived Roma, and supporters.

This is an opportunity to act together to press
for better recognition of educational issues,
and to draw attention to the need for new
legislation, in the form of the drafted Traveller
Law Reform Bill, to make site provision (private
and local authority) easier.

With lots of music and flowers, and children taking
part, it will be both an enjoyable and purposeful
celebration.

PLEASE BE THERE - and bring some flowers!
The flowers are for casting into the Thames in
a ceremony to remember the victims of racism,
past and present.

For more info contact:
Grattan Puxon ustibe.n[at]ntlworld.com
Charles Smith thegypsycouncil[at]btinternet.com

Forwarded on behalf of

Elna C. Green
Allen Morris Associate Professor of History
=46lorida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2200
(850) 644-9531


Subject:
Allen Morris Conference on the History of Florida and the Atlantic World

Call for Papers

The Allen Morris Conference Committee and the Florida State University
History Department are proud to announce the second biennial Allen Morris
Conference on the History of Florida and the
Atlantic World, to be held at the Florida State University's Turnbull
Conference Center, Tallahassee, Florida, February 12, 2002.

The conference theme is "Immigration, Migration, and Diaspora in Florida
and the Atlantic World." The keynote speaker will be Dr. Louis A. P=E9rez,
the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, who will discuss Cuban immigration to
=46lorida.

The Program Committee invites proposals that focus on issues specific to
=46lorida, or that place Florida in a greater Atlantic context. Recognizing
that Florida historically included territory as far
west as the Mississippi River and as far north as English settlements in
the Carolinas, we seek to include colonial era papers that cover the
Spanish Borderlands, but also those that identify Florida
as part of the larger Atlantic world. Topics such as the slave trade could
be expanded to situate Florida in its Caribbean and colonial Spanish
background. Other potential topics might include Native American and
indigenous diaspora or investigations of nontraditional ethnic migrations.
In the modern era, papers could address a variety of topics that include
=46lorida in their analysis, such as "snowbird" migration, migrant labor in
the winter vegetable industry, tourism, and Latin American immigration.

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or complete
panels. Interested applicants should submit a proposal of no more than 300
words for each paper and a brief curriculum vitae for each participant.
Individuals interested in serving as a chair or commentator should forward
a vita as well. Proposals must be received no later than May 1, 2001.

Papers delivered at the Conference will be eligible for inclusion in a
planned anthology on the history of Florida and the Atlantic World.

Paper proposals and inquiries should be addressed to:
Dr. Elna Green
Department of History
=46lorida State University
Tallahassee, FL 323062200
egreen[at]mailer.fsu.edu

Please visit our web site: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~rherrera/allenmorris.htm



**************************************************
Elna C. Green
Allen Morris Associate Professor of History
=46lorida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2200
(850) 644-9531

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Recent reading...

In the light of recent discussion the Ir-D list might find interesting...

Sarah E. Chinn
Technology and the Logic of American Racism
Continuum
London & New York 2000
ISBN 0 8264 4729 5, 0 8264 4750 3 (paperback)

I came across the book as part of my study of the use made of blood group
research by historians and social scientists. I gave a presentation to
colleagues here some time ago - and it is time I wrote it up.

(The Irish connection is that this usage has left some curious little
'factoids' imbedded in Irish history. Like the suggestion that blood group
research has 'suggested' - or sometimes 'shown' or 'proved' - that the
people of the Aran Islands are of English 'blood'. Well, only if you accept
all the race theory, working assumptions, and weird 'science' of the 1930s
and 1940s...)

There are five chapters in Chinn's book - after a first chapter looking at
'the body as evidence', four chapters link specific technologies with
specific works of literature.

First is a study of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, which is surely one of
the most extraordinary works of literature in the world, an exploration of
that deep fissure within American society. At the extraordinary end, when
'Tom Driscoll' is 'unmasked', his colour is not changed - his chattel status
is. (I have seen no comment on the Irish name 'Driscoll' - and assume it
simply signals an elite southern name. Though I have seen discussion of the
'Irishness' of Huckleberry Finn...)

Then a study of Nella Larsen's Passing is linked with the 1925 'Rhinelander'
case. (Rhinelander sued for divorce on the grounds that his wife had
pretended to be white...)

Then - my interest - a very helpful chapter on blood collection and
transfusion during World War 2. Part of the confusion, of course, arises
out of the use of the word 'blood' to mean lineage, rather than that red
stuff that leaks out if you are not careful. Blood for transfusion was
segregated according to obsessions with 'race'. The text studied is a novel
by Jo Sinclair, Wasteland - which I do not know.

Lastly a chapter on DNA. This was, of course, written before the recent
discovery by the Human Genome Project that human beings have a lot fewer
genes that had been supposed - not many more than a mouse. This discovery
has generally been seen as giving a boost to the 'nurture' side in the
nature/nurture debate.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 284 1580
Fax International +44 870 284 1580

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From: Alexander Peach
Subject: RE: Ir-D NYTimes.com on Multiracial Identification

Dear all,

Some thoughts from post-colonial Albion.

>

Sociologists of race and ethnicity have been aware for many years that
"race" is a social construction bound up with the distribution of power
through society. The term is in many ways meaningless except as a
gatekeeper of national "authenticity", itself bound up within ideologies of
nationalism in all its discursive manifestations. The key question to
nationalism - and indeed its official state organ of surveillance the
census - is, "who are the people?". This is where the census is, despite
appearances, an exercise in qualitative surveillance. The questions asked
are more important than the raw data received. So, if you ask me whether I
am white or black I answer white. Include "other" and I become Manx-Irish.
However, ask me what is important to my identity and I would include
working class masculine. Ask a question about my genealogy (as many
immigration acts including Britain's does) and I become
Anglo-Manx-Irish-Welsh-Scots. Perhaps I should put Celtish? But that is a
nationalist construction? Oh hang on so is British, English, Irish,
Scottish, Welsh and Manx? Well, my point. Any question on "Race" is
ideologically embedded and will produce its own specific ideologically
mediated data
The need for a racial question is bound up with a recognition of ethnic
diversity and discrimination. The data is asked for so that policies and
resources can be formulated and allocated. This means they are asking for
information that could lead to special access to public goods through the
creation - often in the face of real need - of special categories. As Mary
Hickman in Britain has pointed out, if you do not ask through ethnic
monitoring whether Irish people in Britain receive discrimination (as they
do) in regard to health, housing and welfare provision then the state will
not provide the necessary policies and resources to deal with such
injustice in a manner fitting of a welfare orientated liberal democracy.
Indeed, I am currently applying for jobs in the university sector here in
the UK. Each application includes an ethnic monitoring form. So far out of
30-40 applications only one has given me the option of putting Irish as my
ethnic group (I am invariably "Othered"). So, if there is any anti-Irish
discrimination in the UK university sector no one would know. So these
questions are important but so is their interpretation.
In regard to the Irish and their position in reference to "whiteness", Noel
Ignatiev makes an interesting argument. This idea of the Irish being
"Othered" by the white Protestants of America is relevant in the UK where
Irish assimilation into an overarching white Britishness has been
restricted by the violent political troubles that still haunt this state.
My work on the nineteenth century has demonstrated the importance of the
"Othering" of the Irish in Britain in the overarching construction of
British national identity. Today, factors of class and ethnicity -
themselves influential in the marginalisation of the Irish in Britain -
have been somewhat ameliorated, the new migrants from Ireland tend to be
better educated and hold jobs in managerial or professional categories.
Culturally, it is pretty cool to be Irish in England and Wales at least,
and religion is not so contentious although Scotland still has serious
anti-Irish/Catholic problems and of course Northern Ireland has a
specificity all of its own. This said, the national media seems to love a
good Catholic priest/nun child abuse story while the far more serious and
widespread secular variety tends not to be given the same
coverage/importance. On the other hand, the liberal daily newspaper The
Guardian has recently started a campaign to overturn the 1701 Act of
Settlement which bars from the royal succession anyone but the legitimately
conceived Protestant heirs of Queen Sophia of Hanover (they are also having
a pop at the 1848 Treason Felony Act that prevents anyone over here calling
for the abolition of the monarchy on pain of imprisonment). This has caused
little consternation apart from the usual reactionary suspects bunkered
down at the Tory Daily Telegraph. So, in England at least the only real
restriction against the Irish assimilating is the political troubles. But
we can always "pass" as English as long as we engage in ethnic suicide by
losing the ethnic markers of name/accent (of which I have evidence of in
nineteenth century Britain). Of course one issue prevalent to the estimated
13,000 Irish travellers in Britain is their status as having "no fixed
abode" , this is massive problem for census surveillance not to mention
assimilation. Of course not every one wants to assimilate but that can be a
hard road to travel.
In the USA the debate is still centred around the colour issue which of
course is connected to their still recent post-slavery/segregationist
history. For most black Americans the access to national "authenticity" has
been won on the level of citizenship but not in other public realms. The
pernicious effects of racism and discrimination is ably demonstrated by the
ethnic monitoring statistics concerning class, health, housing, crime etc.
So for racists, asking the identity question in the census is opening up a
can of discursive ideological worms that would not be problematic if the
interpretations of what ethnic identity actually means were not
ideologically contentious. I.e. racists will argue that the "discovery" of
ethnic heterogeneity leads to a crisis in authenticity and what is more the
inauthentic will increasingly call upon tax payers monies. Perhaps even
more problematic for America as an "idea" is to face up to their historical
and current poor record in regard to racism. As all nations tells stories
to themselves to make them feel better about themselves (shining Cities on
hills and such claptrap), to face up to the idea that America is not white,
not Protestant etc calls for an ideological revolution in the nature of
that society. The current debates on the census findings are hooked up with
this fear. The denial of heterogeneity is crucial to the racist national
discourse because once accepted defining "who are the people" becomes
impossible in ethnic/racial terms as Hugh B. Price points out in the quote
above.
I would argue that all these issues of whom "belongs" and whom "can not
belong" can be traced back to the growth of modernity, the nation state and
urbanisation when - incidentally - the Irish became the first modern mass
immigrants in Britain at least and focused anti-immigrant debates and
discourses on national of authenticity and who should have access to the
fruits of the nation state. But you will have to wait for my book for the
full story on that!
Best wishes,

Dr. Alex Peach.
(No fixed academic abode).
Albion

Somewhere of the coast of a big bit of land sometimes conceptualised
recently as "Europe".

Subject: Re: Ir-D Giant Blind Albino Crocodiles 2
From: Eileen A Sullivan

Carmel,

What is the Spanish Armada/Black Irish myth?

On Sunday, 3/18, I'll be lecturing in St Augustine on the Irish in
Florida during the second Spanish period, 1783-1821. Good opportunity to
demyth.

Eileen

Dr. Eileen A. Sullivan, Director
The Irish Educational Association, Inc. Tel # (352) 332
3690
6412 NW 128th Street E-Mail :
eolas1[at]juno.com
Gainesville, FL 32653

Forwarded for information...

Congressman Rick Boucher, The Ulster-Scots Agency/Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch
and The University of Ulster cordially invite you to attend a reception to
celebrate The Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies World-Wide Academic Network,
April 5, 2001 5:30 - 7:30 pm, 2322 Rayburn House Office Building, Capitol
Hill
Washington, DC. Traditional Ulster and Appalachian music will be played.

The Ulster-Scots Agency/Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch: part of the North-South
Language Implementation Body set up under the Belfast Agreement. The
Agency's mission, funded by the Government of the United Kingdom and the
Government of Ireland, is to promote a greater awareness of Ulster-Scots
language and cultural issues in Northern Ireland and on the island of
Ireland. The Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies at the University of Ulster
was founded to study, develop and encourage the research and study Ulster
Scots culture, heritage and language.

Remarks by:
Congressman Rick Boucher, Ninth District of Virginia
Michael McGimpsey, Minister of Culture, Art and Leisure, Northern Ireland
H. E. Sean O'Huiginn, Ambassador of Ireland
Dr. Gerry McKenna, Vice-Chancellor, University of Ulster
Dr. James Bohland, Interim Provost of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University
Lord Laird of Artigarvan, Chairman, Board of Directors, Ulster-Scots Agency

For information on the Ulster-Scots Agency and the Institute of Ulster-Scots
Studies, please contact:

Kathleen Curtis Wilson John Hegarty, Chief Executive Officer
Agency Representative, USA Ulster-Scots Agency
330 Broad Street 5th Floor, Franklin House
Kingsport TN 37660 10-12 Brunswick Street
Tel: 423-245-3159 Belfast BT2 7GE
Fax: 423-246-7312 Tel: 011 44 289 023 1113
Cel: 423-534-1154 Email: j.hegarty[at]ulsterscotsagency.org.uk
website: www.ulsterscots.
Prof. John Wilson, Director
Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies
University of Ulster at Magee
Northland Road
Londonderry
BT48 7JL
Tel: 011 44 287 137 5228 at Magee
Tel: 011 44 289 036 6157at Jordanstown

RSVP 423-245-3159 Business Attire
Email: kcw_ulsterscotsagency[at]yahoo.com

From: tjarchde[at]facstaff.wisc.edu
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Memorial to the Hunger, Complete With Old Sod
Memorial to the Hunger, Complete With Old Sod


By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Sod and stone. A roofless cottage on a serpentine of tumble-down
walls. Potato furrows, emerald but overgrown. And the wind off the
River Hudson.

A half-acre of Ireland at Battery Park City, in other words, to
serve as a memorial to the potato famine of the 1840's that drove
hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants to New York. The design
is to be unveiled at the site today by Gov. George E. Pataki.

"The land really was the subject, the fragility of the land," said
the artist Brian Tolle, who collaborated on the winning design with
David Piscuskas and Juergen Riehm of 1100 Architect and with the
landscape architect Gail Wittwer, all of New York.

Governor Pataki, whose mother's mother came from County Louth,
said through a spokesman that Mr. Tolle had "captured the essence
of Ireland."

He said that visitors "will be able to become a part of the Irish
countryside while learning about `an Gorta Mor,' " the Great
Hunger, in which millions perished or were forced to emigrate.

Construction of the memorial is to begin next week on Vesey Green,
north of the New York Mercantile Exchange and west of the Embassy
Suites Hotel.

The Irish Hunger Memorial is to be dedicated on March 17, 2002,
joining the New York City Police Memorial and the Museum of Jewish
Heritage ? A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery Park City.
Which invites the question: Is this 92-acre landfill turning into a
necropolis?

"It's far from becoming a mausoleum," said James F. Gill, chairman
of the Battery Park City Authority, which commissioned the memorial
and will pick up its $4.7 million cost. Battery Park City is or
will be home as well to the Skyscraper Museum, the Museum of Women,
30 acres of park, two schools and more than a dozen large artworks,
among large office towers and apartment buildings.

The Irish memorial is to have a contemporary focus, drawing
attention to starvation around the world through a small library
nearby. Mr. Gill said the memorial would be "saying something every
day about this kind of problem, wherever it occurs."

But there is little doubt that it will speak with a brogue.

Mr.
Tolle said he was inspired by a visit last year to a deserted
village on Achill Island in County Mayo, on the west coast of
Ireland. The evocation of this landscape will occupy an irregular
96-by-170-foot reinforced concrete platform, rising 25 feet. It
will sit atop and cantilever over a base made of alternating bands
of stone and translucent resin on which will be inscribed testimony
to the famine: chronicles and quotations, poetry and lyrics.

A passage through the base will lead visitors to the landscape,
placing them inside the cottage. Governor Pataki has written to
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland requesting stones from every
Irish county and if possible an actual house from the southwest.

Around the house will be 8 to 20 inches of soil, planted not only
with Irish grasses and wildflowers but with dandelions and
thistles, too, to keep the landscape from becoming precious or
postcard perfect.

"It will get wet in spots and muddy," Ms. Wittwer said. "It will
smell at some times of the year. It will be very palpable."

The design was chosen in a competition sponsored by the authority,
with five artists invited to participate: St. Clair Cemin, Agnes
Denes, Richard Fleishner, Kiki Smith and Mr. Tolle.

Timothy S. Carey, the president of the authority, said he had been
overwhelmed by Mr. Tolle's proposal. "Even before the artist
explained it," Mr. Carey said, "it had an emotional impact."

One of the memorial's stated purposes is to record the "English
government's actions toward the starving, predominantly Catholic
population and lack of famine relief."

Mr. Gill, whose family came from Counties Sligo and Clare, was
conciliatory, to a point. "I hope the British aren't offended by
it," he said. "But this is something that can't be ignored, and the
lesson should be drawn down. And you can't send down the message if
you don't get to the heart of it."

"I don't see it as being anti-British," he said, "although my
mother- in-law may have other thoughts."



http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/arts/15MEMO.html?searchpv=nytToday?ex=9856
83744&ei=1&en=edb7abd4a57f93d9

/-----------------------------------------------------------------


Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the
most authoritative news coverage on the Web,
updated throughout the day.

Become a member today! It's free!

http://www.nytimes.com?eta



Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Forwarded on behalf of
Ronan Gallagher
Four Courts Press

Please recommend this to your students!

Details of the J.C. Beckett Prize in Irish History are available at our
website. For the winner, there is a medal and a handsome cash prize plus an
option to publish.

The award is ONLY open to those working on a major thesis in Irish history,
be it medieval, celtic, early modern or modern. The closing date for
applications is 31 May 2001. The winners to date are:

2001 Michael Huggins, University of Liverpool: 'A secret society: agrarian
conflict in the pre-famine county Roscommon'

2000 Petri Mirala, University of Helsinki: 'freemasonry, conservatism and
loyalism in Ulster, 1792-1799'

For more details go to Go to www.four-courts-press.ie

Yours, Ronan

Ronan Gallagher
Four Courts Press
Fumbally Lane
Dublin 8

From: TGLynch[at]aol.com
Subject: Re: Ir-D Spanish Armada/Black Irish myth?

Kudos to Dan Cassidy et al for bringing to light some common
misconceptions. However, while the Irish might never have been *officially*
classified as black, they were certainly commonly considered as no better.
Prodigious diarist and New York politico George Templeton Strong referred to
Irish immigrants as "niggers turned inside out", and at least one wealthy
New
Yorker preferred African American servants to Irish domestics; presumably
the
former were more trustworthy. The stereotype was not limited to the urban
locales where the Irish immigrants were most numerous. Southern slaveowners
often preferred to use cheap Irish labor to perform dangerous jobs; they
were
considered expendable, while African American slaves were a commodity which
was costly. Just my two cents. Tim Lynch

From Email Patrick O'Sullivan

Just an example of the vagaries of running an email discussion forum...

The email system at
bc.edu

would NOT deliver the following message

Subject: Ir-D The Ulster-Scots Agency/Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch
Date: Thu 15 Mar 2001 22:00:00 +0000
From: irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
Reply-To: irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk
To: irish-diaspora[at]bradford.ac.uk

because...

'Message contains non-ASCII characters in headers'

Every other email system in the world was happy with the header.

But you folk at bc.edu... You'll never know...

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Email Patrick O'Sullivan

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Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

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