In The Many-Headed Hydra (2000, at 286), Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker observed that the revolutionary fervour of the 1790s gave way to a period of reaction in which “the national and partial” reasserted themselves: “the English working class, the black Haitian, the Irish diaspora,” as if the hybrid red Atlantic separated into its constituent parts: white, black and green. If the colour-coding began separately with the pioneering work of Paul Gilroy and Kevin Whelan, this volume is the first to explore the intersection of “black” and “green,” which did not come to an end in the nineteenth century. On the contrary. From these pages emerges a complex history, by no means reducible to the well-documented hostility to black emancipation on the part of people of Irish descent in the United States – the now almost proverbial tale of “how the Irish became white.”

About a third of the essays adopt a compare-and-contrast approach, taking two contemporaneous individuals or communities and exploring parallels between their work and experiences: Nourbese Philip and Eavan Boland (Stacy J. Lettman), John Mitchell and David Walker (Anthony Hale), IRA hunger strikers and the Zapatista rebels (Denis O'Hearn). Two contributors (Marjorie Howes and Peter O'Neill) consider the figure of the Irish maid (in early Irish modernism, and in late nineteenth-century Californian popular imagery) and make (mainly implied) comparisons with her black counterparts.

In some cases the fusion of “black” and “green” is evident in the subject matter itself, such as Mark Quigley's analysis of the “Celtic jazz” of Irish American hip-hop crew House of Pain, or Jamaican-born Michael S. Colllins's poem about the republican hero who shares his name – in whose “fugue” metaphor Michael Malouf finds a richly suggestive resource for rethinking the two Atlantics.

Other essays focus on a historical encounter, in which the author typically examines Irish attitudes towards – or representations of – black people and popular movements. They include the Fenian support for the Morant Bay uprising of 1865 (Amy Martin), Eugene O'Neill's caricatures of Haiti in Emperor Jones (Cedric Robinson), Samuel Beckett's translations for Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology (Jonathan Naito), and Richard Madden's account of his year-long residence in Jamaica in the 1830s (Fionnghuala Sweeney).

Occasionally, the perspective is reversed, as in Lee Jenkins's reflections on the response of black writers (Anne Spencer, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay) to Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. But there remains a marked asymmetry in the collection in which black perspectives are scrutinized far less than Irish ones. Furthermore, the Atlantic in question is very much a North Atlantic, with precious few references to Africa and Latin America. However, The Black and Green Atlantic exceeds its fine individual contributions in one important respect: by combining a range of competing approaches, the book as a whole puts their key concepts to the test in ways rarely found in a monograph. In doing so, it will provide an invaluable reference point for future work in the field.

For instance, David Lloyd insists that it is how people are “positioned” (rather than an act of will) that determines the likelihood of their identifying with fellow diasporans rather than with their oppressors – and his contrast between the Irish in the British Empire and in the United States is instructive. But other essays suggest that this “positioning” is actually quite diverse and includes not simply the place allotted to you by a “state formation” (making you act always in response to, if not always in accordance with, forms of racial coding in the society at large), but also a role you might choose to play in a radical movement (such as Fenianism, or the United Irishmen, or a broader campaign for civil rights). And in any case (as Sweeney's exemplary reading of Madden suggests), perhaps no amount of “positioning” can fully account for the way a text can discern relationships and imagine possibilities one would never have expected it to, given the structural location or ideological allegiance of the author.