This essay examines the role of blackface in white Irish culture, especially around the time of the emergence of independent Irish statehood in the first half of the twentieth century, as a critical context for contemporary practices and ideas of whiteness in Ireland. This examination takes three forms: the first is a speculative history (and it can be no more) of blackface minstrel theater in Ireland; the second is an analysis of representations of blackface acts in Irish modernism (specifically in works by James Joyce and Jack B. Yeats); and the final section offers a brief consideration of the longer and perhaps ultimately more troubling manifestations of blackface in Irish folk culture.

This chapter “examine[s] the encounter between Irish literature as a ‘terrestrial form of thought,’ and the ocean as a putatively alien environment.” John Brannigan draws on a host of Environmental Humanities scholarship, most specifically from Blue Humanities; his reading treats the oceanic as a critical and material space providing alternative epistemologies to humanity’s dominant land-based knowledge systems. In the “encounter with the maritime” such terrestrial thinking “would find a scene of negation, radical otherness, or utopian or dystopian release.” The chapter begins with an important reminder of “The Real Map of Ireland, a dataset resulting from the Irish National Seabed Survey which mapped the 220 million acres of “land under the sea” over which Ireland is entitled to claim sovereignty and “exclusive economic rights” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).” This new submarine “territory” that extends to almost a thousand kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean and the Maury Channel, and to the south over three hundred kilometers, Brannigan argues, “marks a submarine treasure map” and is open to capital’s inexhaustible extractive appetite.

Recent critical developments in the field of intermodernism have opened new spaces for enquiry in mid-twentieth-century British and American writing, elevating the impact and status of several non-canonical texts typically considered as ‘middlebrow’. Intermodernism re-evaluates the political, even radical, potential of such material in the social environment of its time. This chapter explores the extent to which it offers a viable model for reconstructing the literary landscape of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, as a means of recuperating ‘minor’ novelists of the period, such as Dorothy Macardle, but also of reinterpreting the apparent creative hiatus in the 1940s and 50s, and recognising, in the place of modernist ‘aftermath’, a valuable literary circuitry founded largely on the strength of the ‘middlebrow’ novel. In rereading the period between 1940 and 1960 in particular, this chapter will discuss the definition of the nation in terms of its rural identity and explore the extent to which a supposedly conservative revivalist pastoral, in the work of writers including Walter Macken and Mary Lavin, in fact disguises the potential of a radical or resistant intermodernism.

Vanishing islands

In June 1939, The Times reported the disappearance of the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, when a flying boat called the Guba, which was seeking to establish a route from Britain to Australia that did not involve crossing the Mediterranean, failed to find the islands. The islands were found again the following day, when the Guba reported less cloud cover, but the momentary disappearance sparked an editorial and a string of letters in the following days about the peculiar tendencies of islands. ‘Continents at least stay, for practical purposes, where they are’, declared the Times editorial, ‘no matter with what commotions man may distract their surfaces; but there is no counting on islands’. The editorial goes on to recount renowned instances of mythological and imaginary islands, and to remark upon some of the many literary uses of island settings, such as Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose (1920), and Charles Morgan's popular but now largely forgotten play, The Flashing Stream (1938). The editorial also mentions the case of Thompson Island in the South Atlantic, which recent maritime expeditions had repeatedly failed to find. Thompson Island was declared non-existent in 1943, yet as recently as 1928 the British government had sold export licences to Norwegian whalers to trade in whale oil and guano from the island, and later that year consented to a diplomatic agreement which ceded British sovereignty of the island over to Norway. An essay in The Geographical Journal of 1928 included the sketches and maps produced by Captain Norris from his voyage of the region in 1825 which had laid the foundation of British territorial claims over Thompson and Bouvet Islands, and argued that ‘There seemed no ground for questioning its existence, though there was some degree of uncertainty in its position’. In the same year, a retired naval commander, Rupert Gould, in a chapter of his book devoted to ‘doubtful islands’, held fast to the belief that there were unexplored areas around the South Atlantic seas in which Thompson Island may yet be found.

As Roy Foster comments in his biography, there is a hollow ring to the end of Yeats's late poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’. It is a preposterous notion that Yeats might be judged not for his books, but ‘in the roll-call of his acquaintance’. The poem reflects upon the portraits and history paintings hung in the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, a collection which celebrated the cultural and political history of the newly independent nation. Yeats alludes in passing to the portraits of Casement, Griffith, and Higgins, and paintings by Lavery, Keating, and Orpen, but it is finally ‘we three alone’ – Gregory, Synge, and himself – whose contributions to the making of the modern nation he comes to extol. The poem closes with what Foster describes as ‘an implicit epitaph for himself, and his own assumption into the heroic frieze of portraits’. To look upon the portraits of Gregory and Synge, Yeats suggests, is also to look upon his own portrait.

‘Ireland, and black!’, the title for this chapter, comes from the ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, published anonymously in 1849, and attributed to Thomas Carlyle, in which Carlyle forewarns that the consequences of emancipating the West Indies would be a ‘black Ireland – “free”, indeed, but an Ireland, and black!’ The punctuation of this phrase, ‘Ireland, and black!’, with caesura and exclamation registers the pathetic incongruity of the two terms, which are at the same time conjoined, and in each iteration in Carlyle's discourse the signification of black Ireland is marked textually or rhetorically as incompatible. Compared to ‘our own white or sallow Ireland, sluttishly starving, from age to age’, Carlyle says, ‘a negro Ireland’ would be beyond comprehension: ‘Imagination cannot fathom such an object; the belly of chaos never held the like’. Of course, Carlyle is using this impossible object, ‘black Ireland’, as a figure of inhuman depravity with which to attack philanthropic arguments about the West Indies, and the figure of ‘black Ireland’ is re-located to the Caribbean in ways which might lead us to pursue the same deconstructive reading as Colin Graham when he traces the tropological (and indeed tropical) flotation of ‘Ireland’ as a signifier in his essay, ‘Ireland, East of Atlantis’. One of the floating signifiers of ‘Ireland’ Graham reads in this essay is from John Mitchel's Jail Journal, published a year before Carlyle's text, in which Mitchel exclaims in surprise when discovering another island called ‘Ireland’ on his journey to Bermuda.

Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, Ireland became a multi-cultural society. It happened in or around 1996, and caught everyone by surprise. The television comedy series, Father Ted, dramatised this moment in an episode first screened in March 1998. Father Ted, to relieve the boredom of having to clean the house, gives Father Dougal a knowing smile, puts a ‘coolie’ lampshade on his head, pulls back the skin on either side of his eyes to narrow them to a slit, peels his upper lip back over his teeth, and then proceeds to mimic a Chinese pidgin-English accent, saying ‘Oh! Ho! I am Chinese if you please’. The audience laughs, and Father Ted goads Dougal for appearing rather dumbstruck by his ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’ impression, but Ted's cheeky grin soon disappears when he turns to find three Chinese people looking at him through his window. Ted looks aghast to Dougal for an explanation, and is told that the Chinese people are the Yin family living in ‘that whole Chinatown area’. ‘There's a Chinatown in Craggy Island?’, gasps Ted, and then admonishes Dougal for not telling him this: ‘Dougal, I wouldn't have done a Chinaman impression if I'd known there was going to be a Chinaman there to see me doing a Chinaman impression. … They'll think I'm a racist’.

In the opening scenes of John Ford's classic film, The Quiet Man (1952), the quality of hospitality appears to be conditional upon protocols of familial and communal recognition. As Sean Thornton emerges from his train – three hours late – on to the platform of Castletown, a crowd of railway staff and bystanders react with puzzlement to his arrival, anxiously querying his intentions, and mistaking him for a foreign tourist bent on fishing. It is only when he reveals to his hired driver, Michaeleen, the identity of his father and mother, and that he was born in the local village of Innisfree, that it is clear he is a returning migrant, and not an American tourist. The passage from foreigner to native is repeated in the scene in the bar in which Thornton's greeting and offer to buy drinks is met with hostile silence until a village elder establishes Thornton's local pedigree. As a native, Thornton is immediately re-integrated into the rituals of the community. A crowd instantly gathers around him singing the Irish-Australian rebel song, ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, and stands by him against the seething hostility of the local ‘squireen’. The parish priest, too, welcomes him back into the community upon learning of Thornton's genealogy by telling him to be at mass the following morning at seven. Ford's film goes on to dramatise the struggle between Thornton and the squireen to be the local übermensch, one forged in the steel factories and boxing clubs of Pittsburgh, the other in the agrarian labour of an Irish farm.

The advertisement for Golden Blush cigarettes which took up the front page of the Irish Independent on 4 January 1922 offers a revealing graphic narrative of Ireland's passage into industrialised modernity. In contrast to the well-worn themes of colonial oppression, mass emigration, and economic underdevelopment, the sequential illustrations bring us from the raw materials in plantation fields in Virginia, controlled by the Irish manufacturers, through to the cathedral-like cigarette factory in Dublin, and on to the happy male consumers who symbolise an Irish public, mature and contented with its own modernity. Embroidered with a Celtic interlace design, the illustrations are thus branded with allegiance to the cultural nationalism of the revival period, and announce the arrival of a specifically Irish industrial modernity. In doing so, it proffers a political vision more optimistic than was possible for the provisional government ushered into place just three days later, on 7 January 1922, when the Dáil ratified the Anglo-Irish treaty, and thus paved the way for the establishment of the Irish Free State later that year. The advertisement envisions industrial development, profitable on the back of cheap foreign raw materials, and skilled employment in manufacturing, distribution, and sales in a city characterised by social harmony, prosperity, and a thriving consumer culture. That this story of national triumph is concerned with tobacco, a product with historic associations with colonial and capitalist exploitation of black labour, is itself significant and revealing of the ideological complexities of this marriage of counter-colonial nationalism and industrial modernity.