“Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland”

ABEI Journal

Considering that Irish people have always migrated to other countries in order to find better working and living conditions, this fact changed during the period when Ireland, due to its rapid economic growth, was branded as a "Celtic Tiger." It is now possible to analyse literary works representing contemporary immigrants in the island and this is particularly well achieved in Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature. According to Pilar Villar-Argáiz in her introduction to Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland, "one of the immediate consequences of the economic success of the country was the reversal of emigration, from outward to inward migration" (1). In this way, Ireland became a multicultural country during this period and, according to Declan Kiberd in his foreword to the same work, "you might expect the emergence of new and complex forms of narrative to capture these hybridities and complications" (xiv). That is exactly what this collection does: it presents essays by eighteen different authors in order to analyze the representation of the so-called "New Irish" (the immigrants who migrated to Ireland from the 1990s onwards) in contemporary literature. The collection is divided into four parts: "Irish Multiculturalisms: obstacles and challenges"; "Rethinking Ireland as a post nationalist community"; "The return of the repressed: 'performing' Irishness through intercultural encounters"; and "Gender and the city." In Part One, chapter two, Charlotte McIvor analyses the works of Donal O'Kelly, Declan Gorman and Charlie O'Neill, situating their careers as playwrights in terms of the community arts movement's commitment to achieving more equal access to art creation. Amanda Tucker suggests that the works of Claire Keegan and Roddy Doyle "depict a non-threatening, non-challenging multicultural Ireland that attempts to solve the challenges of diversity through Irish hospitality and good will" (55) in opposition to the works of Emma Donoghue and Cauvery Madhavan which "point to persistent and perhaps insolvable questions about both individual and collective identity" (61). In Chapter Four, Pilar Villar-Argáiz "challenges this idealisation of Irish multiculturalism by revealing the various ways in which newcomers are marginalised in present-day Ireland" (64) through the analysis of poems by Colette Bryce, Mary O'Donnell and Michael O'Loughlin. In the following chapter, Margarita Estévez-Saá points out that "only when the Celtic Tiger began to collapse, and these communities of immigrants became redundant, did the Irish writers turn their gaze more attentively towards these members of the community" (85) and she analyses the reflection of this gaze in the novels of Éilís

Book Review

2024

Race in Irish Literature and Culture provides an in-depth understanding of intersections between Irish literature, culture, and questions of race, racialization, and racism. Covering a vast historical terrain from the sixteenth century to the present, it spotlights the work of canonical, understudied, and contemporary authors in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and among diasporic Irish communities. By focusing on questions related to Black Irish identities, Irish whiteness, Irish racial sciences, postcolonial solidarities, and decolonial strategies to address racialization, the volume moves beyond the familiar frameworks of British/Irish and Catholic/Protestant binarisms and demonstrates methods for Irish Studies scholars to engage with the question of race from a contemporary perspective.

Europe - Space for Transcultural Existence?, Martin Tamcke, Janny de Jong, Lars Klein, Margriet van der Waal eds., 2013, Göttingen Universitätsverlag ISBN: 978-3-86395-062-0