This chapter introduces the essays of this book and historicizes why a book on race in Irish literature and culture is of special significance at this contemporary moment in the twenty-first century. The editors signal the ubiquity of the concept of race in Irish letters and the changing iterations of that concept, especially since the Celtic Revival. Irishness has been compared and even equated to blackness to serve both colonial and nationalist agendas. However, in Revivalist and post-Celtic Tiger discourses, the racial imaginary surrounding Irishness has also been silenced in telling ways. This essay connects the dots between these divergent histories to narrativize a critical position that aids a decolonial framing of the subject of race, Irish literature, and Irish culture. Such a decolonial endeavor is especially urgent at a time when fascist nationalisms and white supremacy are becoming key geopolitical registers. It is also a time when Irish whiteness is being scrutinized and when Black Irishness is gaining recognition. This is a unique moment in the history of Ireland, and it is partly because of the growing crescendo of cultural identification by a biracial population within Ireland.

Sen’s chapter examines specific historical manifestations of race, particularly the representations of black and brown bodies in Joyce’s texts, annotating Joyce’s concerns with twentieth-century colonialism while also acknowledging the enduring forms of imperialism and hegemony in the contemporary moment: the multiethnic contemporary present of Irish life and the concurrent reinvigoration of white supremacist and racist nationalisms in twenty-first-century geopolitics.Sen’s chapter asks how Joyce’s texts inform our understanding of the present and its multiple sociopolitical and ecological challenges within which race operates as a key determinant. He examines a scene in “The Dead” as staging the delegitimization of the subject of blackness, appearing as it does as an impolite intrusion upon civil discourse. He interprets the reading in “Cyclops” of the account of the lynching as normalizing violence against bodies of color. Sen asks when Joycean ironies fail to humanize and modernize subjects of color within empire.

This chapter provides a broad survey of the field of Irish literature and the environment, and challenges some of the ways in which the subject has been broached thus far. It argues that the exponential effects of the climate crisis are now being felt across the world in a manner that demands urgent critical intervention and innovation. How is Irish Studies reacting to the momentous ontological and epistemological crises ushered in by the Anthropocene epoch? As the chapters of this survey indicate, scholars working in the field of Irish Studies are increasingly using interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary tools to analyze Irish culture’s relationship to the environment. The chapter goes on to summarize the contents and contexts of the contributions to this volume.