Studies of race in Joyce's work have concentrated mostly on his depiction of Anglo-Irish tensions. Joyce, Race and “Finnegans Wake” takes scholarship into a historically precise, but broader, arena, extending it to Joyce's engagement with European cultural discourses about race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Juxtaposing scholarship in history, race theory, philosophy, anthropology, and literary criticism with his analysis of Joyce's novel, Len Platt offers a provocative main argument: that the strangeness of Finnegans Wake is a riposte to a culture enormously invested in normalizing strangeness and difference.

I should note, at the outset, that there is an inconsistency between the chapter numbers Platt offers in his introduction and the numbers that appear at the start of each chapter and in the book's table of contents. While referencing various parts of the text, I will echo in this review Platt’s—rather than Cambridge University Press’s—division of his text. Following his introduction, Platt's book is laid out in seven chapters, including a conclusion. The first two chapters discuss Finnegans Wake and the “myth” of Aryan identity, especially as produced within an academy that manufactured racist, Germano-centric theses in the name of rationality and reason. Demonstrating the influence of Vico's political arguments—especially his rejection of myths of illustrious origin—on Finnegans Wake, chapter 1 shows the novel's puncturing of the Aryanist sympathies of such academic discourse. Chapter 2 considers definitions of the Celt, the Teuton, and the Aryan before proceeding to expose the flaws in these conceptions and their breakdown under precise scrutiny. Platt's text stresses the political use of correspondences between Irish practices and the Hellenic culture that Matthew Arnold championed, both strongly privileging conventions and continuity over cultural transformation. Platt is especially persuasive on how invented Celtic and Aryan identities operate associatively, interwoven forces that dubiously bind (but simultaneously, and more often, undo) selfhood and nationhood. The political machinery of Eamon de Valera's Irish Free State encouraged this paradoxical association as one based on efficiency and reason. As Platt demonstrates Joyce's mockery of the “rationality” of this state, he claims that Joyce's suspicion of hierarchized reason and civilizations did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. As evidence, Platt perceptively indicates the particular significance of Freud's Totem and Taboo and the anthropological work of Durkheim, Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown—as well as the early twentieth-century collapse of the Enlightenment project, at large—in dissolving the cultural prejudice that maintained binary distinctions between “civilized” and “primitive” races.

Joyce's scrutiny and deflation of social Darwinism and eugenics (articulated through nineteenth-century anthropology, sociology, craniology, and paleontology) occupy Platt's third chapter, which examines the entrenchment of scientific racism by the end of the nineteenth century. In this chapter especially, Platt supplements his reading of the novel with an energetic mining of Joyce's notebooks, extending the trend of “genetic criticism” in Joyce scholarship. The fourth chapter explores the links between theosophy and race in Finnegans Wake. While acknowledging the mark of theosophy (especially of Bruno's “coincidence of contraries” and Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled) on the assimilative and combinative strategies in the portrayal of race in Finnegans Wake, Platt also notes Joyce's playful dismissal of Blavatsky's and Bruno's mystic subscription to magic and arcana (111). Chapter 5 considers the performance of what Platt calls “staged race” in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Transferring a common view of Orientalism to the realm of the popular, Platt argues that more often than not, the racial Other functions as a screen for the projection of “Western” fantasy through popular culture, especially musical theater (121–22). Blackness and the “Oriental Other” are represented in “highly theatrical ways” that function as racial appropriations, unconcerned with historical precision and including instances as different as blackface minstrelsy, impersonations of black life through the figures of Zip Coon and Jim Crow, pantomimic portrayals of the mysterious male Other (Turko the Terrible and Alibaba), parodied characters from the Indian subcontinent, as well as Japanoiserie in musical theater (12). Platt recognizes that Finnegans Wake is implicated in this exercise, but he argues that “being placed almost without exception in the world of play-acting and make-believe” (121) within Joyce's novel, the performances are undermined even as they are reproduced. Chapter 6 insightfully groups the tensions within race discourse—the vulgar languages of “filth,” fascism, and the family—into a single discussion. Platt contrasts Finnegans Wake's celebration of contamination with the emphasis on hygiene in Nazi Germany and with Nazi “policies and systems designed to prevent the birth of the ‘racially unfit’” (154), revealing the limitations of Hitlerian aesthetics of racial purity through his alertness to Joyce's strategies of admixture and vulgarity.

Platt's conclusion situates race as a dynamic in relation to prominent interpretations of Finnegans Wake. Arguing against the reduction of “the monstrosity of the Wake” into a single argument or problematic, Platt takes issue with several critics, conceding varying amounts of worth to their readings and warning against the depoliticizing and dehistoricizing of Joyce's texts. As he critiques several works of Joyce scholarship from the past century, Platt notes the dangers of taming Joyce's wild text within the frames of a single or dominant reading and rightly privileges “a much more interesting and demotic form of chaos” (169). This “Wakean” chaos suggests a swirl of modern realities jostling and correlative to several kinds of modernity. Keeping this in mind would have helped Platt when, in his introduction, he contends that “it is substantially through the idea of race that Joyce … takes a position on modernity in the Wake” (4), that Joyce's concern with race “also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity” (2), and that “Finnegans Wake was … published … at a turning point in the history of both the modernising project and of racism” (9). These claims raise several questions about Platt's inadequately explained view of modernity. Does Joyce dispute modernity, at large? To which version of modernity does this refer? Was there a single, undifferentiated “modernising project”? If not, to which one does he refer?

Such questions notwithstanding, Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake is a wide-ranging, bold, historically engaged, and often witty work and should provide a fillip for cultural investigations into the broader contexts of Joyce's work.