Envisaged as a companion volume to David Fitzpatrick’s The Americanisation of Ireland: migration and settlement, 1841–1925 (2019), Fionnuala Walsh’s edited collection, covering the same historical period, takes up Fitzpatrick’s intentionally ‘tendentious’ use of the term ‘Americanisation’ (xii). The book comprises ‘eight thematic chapters’ that consider the concept in relation to ‘material culture, marketing, religion, politics, literature, cinema, music, and folklore’ (2). As Fitzpatrick acknowledged, in a demographic study such as his own, it is ‘obviously impossible to tease out precisely what influences exotic human agents exercised on those with whom they interacted in Ireland’ (xii). It is perhaps even more difficult to quantify the influence of ideas or forms of visual, material and textual culture. Given this, the strongest essays in the present collection are rigorous in their interrogation of the very term ‘Americanisation’. Noting that in discussions of religious identity, the term ‘Americanisation’ has typically been applied to Irish migrants’ assimilation into US society with the help of Irish and Irish-American clergy, Sarah Roddy observes that the reverse trend (the influence of Irish-American religion on religious practices in Ireland) begets a whole series of questions:
Does that influence need to be direct, in the sense that changes are made in Ireland that mimic a perceived American way of living and worshipping? Or might there even be a kind of Americanisation in the conscious rejection of American influence, or in the holding up of America as a negative contrast to Ireland, or as an example not to be followed in some aspects of life, including the religious? (72)
Perhaps the best way of understanding ‘Americanisation’, argues Roddy, is ‘as an increasing closeness between America and Ireland, a metaphorical shrinking of the Atlantic Ocean and a greater, more sustained and more intense exchange of people, goods and ideas’ (72–3). Niall Whelehan, too, identifies potential pitfalls in the term ‘Americanisation’. It is falsely homogenising (as Fitzpatrick himself observed), eliding ‘the vast geographical and cultural diversity’ of the United States. Moreover, the framework ‘could also lead us to focus on just one source of external influence in Ireland, with the accompanying risk of closing off other interactions at play’ (95).
The essays collectively consider ‘Americanisation’ in an expansive fashion, encompassing actual returnees to Ireland (temporary or permanent); ideas and ideologies that circulated in transatlantic print media (Patrick Ford’s New York newspaper The Irish World, for example, or cheap periodicals peddling mythologies of the American West in Britain and Ireland, or posters advertising transatlantic passenger services); material culture such as the ‘American parcel’; rituals such as the ‘American wake’; visual culture and early cinema; and Irish traditional music. Several contributors are attentive to questions of race, thus acknowledging and enlarging upon important scholarship on Irishness and whiteness in the United States. ‘To what extent were American ideologies of race exported to (and adopted) in Ireland?’ is one way of framing this question. Whelehan notes that Ford portrayed the Land War in Ireland ‘as part of a global wave of reform that would follow in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the United States’, while some Irish Land Leaguers analogised the experiences of the Irish rural poor to those of enslaved subjects in the US prior to abolition (104–5). Meanwhile, Kevin Rockett argues persuasively that, given blackface minstrel shows were a feature of the Irish popular entertainment scene in the 1830s and 1840s, it is likely that Irish migrants of the Famine era and beyond ‘carried with them to America a distorted image of African Americans, in part shaped by Irish Americans [who performed in the shows], that eased their way into mainstream “white” culture and society’ (149).
As this brief gloss suggests, the most compelling essays in the collection emphasise exchange, dialogism and reciprocity rather than one-way traffic or straightforward influence. Given this, it is odd that Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (1993) is not cited in the book at all. Gilroy’s rejection of origins and authenticity in favour of a conception of culture characterised by fusion, hybridity and syncretism has spawned a whole set of other ‘Atlantics’: Red, Brown and, in an Irish context, Green and Orange. The term ‘Green Atlantic’ was first used by Kevin Whelan in 2004. However, as David Gleeson notes in The Irish in the Atlantic World, the extensive Irish Unionist (or ‘Orange’) presence and influence in the Atlantic world ‘moves us away from the idea that any Irish Atlantic could be described as a “Green” one’ (10). As such, ‘Irish Atlantic’ is, arguably, a more inclusive term.
The book closes with a brief assessment by Roy Foster of Fitzpatrick’s influence and legacy. For Foster, the essays in the volume show how Fitzpatrick’s ‘capacious historical imagination advanced and identified themes and projects which would be carried forward by future generations’ (231). Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s work had far-reaching implications beyond the discipline of history. Similarly, America in Ireland’s interest in transatlantic boundary-crossing is mirrored in its transcendence of disciplinary borders: its capacious treatment of the ‘Americanisation’ of Ireland will be valuable for scholars working in a wide range of disciplines.
