Eccentric Nation: Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century New York CityEccentric Nation examines four performance events in nineteenth-century New York City in which Irish cultural nationalism was constructed and reinforced by musicians, actors, playwrights, speakers, paraders, and athletes, and disseminated among diverse crowds that included both Irish- and Anglo-Americans. Their contemporaries and more recent analysts alike have often taken these performance conventions as representations of a common Irish voice or a monolithic national identity. Close examination reveals a much more conflicted Irish community. What appeared as shared symbolism was contested among both Irish- and Anglo-Americans. Masculine nationalist heroes, visions of a romanticized peasant class, evocations of collective memories, and the repetition of performance traditions all served to reinforce the idea of a single community bound together. Those symbols often gave rise to diverse meanings that were circulated in the urban populace. Each chapter examines the staging of these four events that produced dissension in the Irish community, providing insight into the ways that a nation is imagined in different ways by a broad array of people who have a stake in its existence, even if they often disagree about its core identity. Stephen Rohs is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Michigan State University. |
Common terms and phrases
audiences authentic ballads blackface Bold Soldier Boy Boyne Water broadside celebrated Celtic Celts city's Colleen Bawn conflict contest crowds Day parade Dion Boucicault editorial Eily elite embodied Emigrant Emmet Ennis ethnic exile fight Gallowglasses Gilmore's Garden Green Hall Hardress Harrigan and Hart Irish Catholics Irish character Irish community Irish cultural Irish identity Irish immigrants Irish in America Irish music Irish national Irish nationalists Irish performance Irish traditions Irish World Irish-American Irishman John July 12 March 17 masculine memory military minstrelsy Morrissey Mulligan Guard Ball Myles nativism nativist newspapers Orange Riots Orangemen orations Patrick's Day peasant play political Poole popular procession Protestant Irish racial reported resistance Ronald Bayor social song spectacle sporting stage stereotypes story streets symbols Theatre Comique Thomas Francis Meagher Timothy Meagher tion tional United University Press William working-class Yankee York City York Daily Tribune York Irish York Sun York World