Prompted by Gary Peatling's incisive analysis of purported postcolonial “proximities” between the historical experiences and representations of the Irish and those of colonized or subjugated nonwhite groups, I would like to consider whether his insistence on the “whiteness of Ireland” can be applied to the Irish in Britain, that “curious middle place” in the Irish diaspora. Drawing upon my current research on Liverpool, fulcrum of much Irish and other European migration, I want briefly to explore discourses of whiteness within a cosmopolitan setting. While lending support to some of Peatling's criticisms of culturalist approaches, my comment will underline the value of cultural history in reconstructing ethnic identities in complex, contingent, and contested contextual interaction, the approach commended by the leading American ethnic and migration historians.Footnote 1 Such best practice, however, is at risk from the very popularity of whiteness studies: a dominant motif in American ethnic history, whiteness has moved from cultural construction to essentialist formulation, an intellectual irony recently underlined by Peter Kolchin (and surely not to be lost on Peatling). Whiteness has come to be presented as omnipresent, unchanging, and “real,” formulations that “risk losing sight of contextual variations and thereby undermining the very understanding of race and whiteness as socially constructed.”Footnote 2

Peatling's trenchant critique of postcolonial Irish studies, which he describes as “compromised by a failure to ask fundamental and historical questions about the representativeness and influence of the favored sources” (p. 133), resonates with wider current concern about “the problem of cultural history.” In a stimulating think piece in the new journal Cultural and Social History, Peter Mandler has stressed the need “to evaluate not only the meanings of a text but also its relations to other texts, its significance in wider discursive fields, its ‘throw’, its dissemination and influence.”Footnote 3 Recent developments in historical geography posit a more serious challenge, questioning the very text-based agenda of cultural history. Rejecting the concept of culture as text, “nonrepresentational theory” approaches culture as performance, emphasizing the “full fluidity of the hybridisation of place identity.” Historians are called upon to demote the significance of time, to adjust to “space time” in which “space is ascribed a more central role in the production of a constantly open temporality,” leading to a most daunting prospectus for study of the Irish diaspora:

I want to suggest something far less radical and far more accessible for historical study: the importance of public performance. As recent work on Hanoverian London has shown, ethnic identities were constructed and contested, paraded and graded in performance on the authorized stage and by itinerant “artistes” on the streets.Footnote 5 It was dramatic representation, not printed portrayal (the cartoon caricatures much studied by historians), that offended Irish sensibilities.Footnote 6 My research in progress on Liverpool, the most cosmopolitan of Victorian cities, shows how the “stage Irishman” was an intensely contested figure whose eradication and/or replacement was the first priority for the leaders and “culture brokers” of the huge Irish migrant community.Footnote 7

There is an urgent need for a cultural history of the Liverpool-Irish, inhabitants of the most significant ethnic “enclave” in Victorian Britain but now displaced from the revisionist narrative of the Irish in Britain, a celebration of widespread distribution, successful socioeconomic integration, and “ethnic fade.”Footnote 8 Labeled as “the dregs” by Father Nugent (an Irish Liverpudlian himself), those who remained in the port of entry have been dismissed as the caput mortuum, a kind of underclass, as it were, unable, unwilling, or unsuited to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere in Britain or the new world.Footnote 9

Amiable amusement at their arrival—The Picturesque Hand-Book to Liverpool recommended the entertainment to be derived by a visit to the Clarence Dock when the Irish packets docked—gave way to harsh stereotyping as the famine influx intensified. Noting the arrival of “Irish Pauper, Esq. and family, attended by his suite, including Messrs. Fever, Starvation, Taxes, Impudence and Knavery, etc.,” the Liverpool Lion chronicled Mr. Dennis Bulgruddery's brazen prowess and blarney in cheating relief agencies, fraudulent begging, inner-city pig keeping, heavy drinking, and fisticuffs.Footnote 10 The virulence of anti-Irish prejudice, expressed throughout print culture and across performance arenas from the pulpit to the “low” concert hall, was undeniable: however, these cultural attitudes lacked legislative discriminatory sanction, another instance of the distance identified by Peatling between cultural sources and the political decision-making process. Indeed, while attitudes hardened, Irish migrants in Liverpool (and throughout Britain) began to benefit from progressive relaxation of settlement requirements under the poor law (an irony first revealed by Frank Neal's Liverpool-based analysis of the 1846 legislation).Footnote 11 The profoundly negative caricature of the Irish, David Feldman suggests, “had only slight impact on poor law policy in England. Policy towards the Irish became more generous despite their negative image not because this image became more favourable.”Footnote 12 Whether entering through Liverpool or other ports, the Irish in Victorian Britain were migrants in a single market and united kingdom.Footnote 13 There were no legal, linguistic, pigmentary, or other phenotypic means of distinguishing and defining them as alien and hence more exploitable, yet they were overwhelmingly located at the bottom of labor markets and residential hierarchies. Amplified recurrently in caricature, stereotype, and stage portrayal at times of political crisis, crude prejudice alone (without legal or scientific racialist sanction) seems to have labeled Irish migrants as the “internal other.”

Stigmatized but not subjugated, the Liverpool-Irish were far from passive victims of such prejudice. The Emerald, “the first Irish Magazine ever brought out in Liverpool,” drew critical attention to “Irish misrepresentations, for the vulgar stage representation of them has contributed more than even their own worse conduct has done towards making our countrymen in England objects of contempt, or of a condescending patronage (like the humoring a lunatic or wayward buffoon) which is far harder to bear than down right contempt.”Footnote 14 Once rescued from derision, the “stage Irishman” was to be recast and reclaimed for “national regeneration” not only in literary endeavor on the boards of licensed theaters but also in popular format across Liverpool's ever-growing entertainment sector: “authentic” images of Ireland and its people were offered in dioramas, waxworks, and music-hall spectacles with casts of up to a hundred. While much of this commercial provision operated on a Liverpool-Dublin circuit, popular entertainment in Liverpool was enlivened by influences beyond the “inland” Irish Sea, Liverpool's private Celtic empire.Footnote 15 The landfall of American popular culture, Liverpool—economic and cultural entrepôt linking the old world and the new—reveled in such imports as blackface minstrelsy. By no means an exercise in cultural autarky, the emergence of a more assertive and explicitly ethnic confidence in the home rule period owed much to a transitional period of cultural borrowing when enthusiastic adoption of blackface minstrelsy enabled the Liverpool-Irish finally to set aside their pejorative “Oirish” stage representation and promote “national regeneration.”

As recent studies of their compatriots in America have suggested, Irish delight in commercial blackface minstrelsy was an important cultural marker in the multifaceted process by which they became white, entering the American mainstream to enjoy the “wages of whiteness.”Footnote 16 Shorn of its initial tensions, ambiguities, and oppositional force (its racial dialectic of love and theft), blackface minstrelsy became an Americanizing ritual, offering socially insecure Irish migrants a sense of superiority over the blacks with whom they were once identified (labeled respectively as “white negroes” and “smoked Irish”) and from whom they were able to distance themselves by parody.Footnote 17 Transposed to Liverpool—British base of Sam Hague's “original slave troupe” that included some “real niggers”—blackface minstrelsy enabled the Irish to confirm their whiteness while at the same time, however, asserting their “ethnic” difference. In a bewildering process of cultural and commercial fusion and borrowing, “negro entertainment” spread beyond the professional stage to become the main attraction in the lecture halls and meeting rooms of Irish and Catholic associational culture. One of the most popular troupes, the Emerald Minstrels, adjusted the Christy-style format to conclude with a one-act tableau suitably transposed from the conventional setting, an idealized paternalist plantation in the Deep South, to a warm and welcoming Irish domestic scene, “Terence's fireside”:

By drawing in the crowds, the minstrelsy format (which allowed ample space for the melodious tones of the Irish tenor alongside the “nigger antics”) provided the means to replace and render obsolete the “stage Irishman,” to attract and promote reform among a popular audience of “low Irish” otherwise averse to “improvement” and at risk of degeneration amid the cosmopolitan temptations of the Liverpool waterfront, and to project a sentimental nationalism (well suited to poor migrants and their Irish-English “Patois”) without undue ideological or (Gaelic) linguistic demands.Footnote 19

A transitional phase in the cultural politics of the Liverpool-Irish, the adoption of blackface minstrelsy prepared the way for the home rule challenge when John Denvir, a former “Emerald Minstrel,” promoted penny Irish national concerts that no longer permitted “Yankee rubbish” or “nigger antics” but offered exclusively Irish (not Gaelic) entertainment in vaunted superiority to the coarse vulgarities of the British music hall.Footnote 20 Although it remained long in vogue at Catholic charitable and temperance entertainments, blackface minstrelsy had served its purpose for the advocates of national regeneration, carrying the Irish upward in the cultural market. Where the stage Irishman was a parody figure with redeemable features (hence the music-hall refrain, “Pat's not so black as he's painted”), the “nigger” minstrel was beyond civilized reform, purportedly portrayed at his “semibarbarian” best in blackface minstrelsy: “It is only the bright side of his character that is presented to us. We see him in his best dress, in his gayest mood, and indulging in his favourite pastime, not in his indolent sloth, his repulsive filth, and his irreclaimable vice.”Footnote 21 With the “negro” securely below, the Liverpool-Irish were able to redesignate their locale, to transform “diaspora space” into segregated territory.

Adjacent to the waterfront and the notorious places of “low entertainment,” catering (as Charles Dickens discovered) for the vast floating, migrant, and casual population of the great seaport, the north end had been among the most cosmopolitan areas of Victorian Liverpool.Footnote 22 Italian, Jewish, and various other street performers and artistes crowded into Homer's Gardens, fictional setting (“not far from one of the great thoroughfares leading to the ‘North-end’”) of The Brandons, Denvir's serialized story of Irish life in Liverpool.Footnote 23 A favorite port of call for African-American seamen where they enjoyed, Herman Melville recorded, “unwonted immunities,”Footnote 24 waterfront and north-end Liverpool was markedly different from other British urban settings, more akin to Five Points, New York (also visited by Dickens), with its “syncretic” fusion between Irish and black culture.Footnote 25 Among the more notorious parts of the north end was “Blackman's Alley,” the polite sobriquet for the network of streets and brothels where migrant Irish women, in the absence of factory or other regular employment, secured a niche market in the sex industry, servicing “black” sailors (“dark Jack” to use Dickens's terminology), the “numerous negroes always present in Liverpool as ships’ cooks, stewards, seamen and labourers.”Footnote 26 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the north end had become no-go territory for blacks.

This dramatic transformation has not featured in Liverpool's rich but flawed demographic history. Census statistics have been deployed as “hard” evidence for a positivist case study in the paradigmatic “urban transition,” placing Liverpool ahead of other cities in its “modern” spatial segregation in which distinct areas took their character and identity from the socioeconomic status of the residents with subsidiary variables such as position in the family life cycle and ethnosectarian affiliation.Footnote 27 Studies of sectarian violence have highlighted disputed borders between “green” and “orange,” but the inviolable boundary that kept “black” distant and apart awaits investigation.Footnote 28 Obscured from the census, “China town,” “dark town,” and “other alien quarters” were all located at some distance from the epicenter of Edwardian Irish Liverpool.Footnote 29 “Negroes, Chinese, Mulattoes, Filipinos, almost every nationality under the sun” were to be found in the south end, but they seldom ventured into the north end.Footnote 30 “Blacks” lived apart in Toxteth, the “New Harlem of Liverpool.”Footnote 31

Undeniably white, the Liverpool-Irish were proudly green and apart from the British and Protestant mainstream. Reinforced by electoral geography (the Scotland Division was to be T. P. O’Connor's parliamentary fiefdom for over four decades, complemented by the “Nat-labism” of local Irish councillors)Footnote 32 and by the pattern of Catholic church building and infrastructural provision, the north end became almost exclusively Irish and Catholic—“a piece cut off from the old sod itself”Footnote 33—giving spatial meaning and protection to the hyphenated identity of the Liverpool-Irish. Disinclined to leave Liverpool, they settled for a “low” whiteness, below British working-class norms, which shaded very readily into an intuitive and compensatory “greenness.” There were some who rejected such hybridity, who wished to take ethnic cleansing a stage further. Their efforts to implant a strictly Gaelic “Irish-Irish” culture failed to resonate: indeed, much offense was taken in the north end when these enthusiasts sought to denigrate the popular home rule project as but the latest inflexion of caricature “stage” Irishness. Imbued with scientific racialism, Gaelic essentialists took whiteness for granted: energies were concentrated on self-sufficient promotion of an exclusive celticism within a European racial hierarchy. Although “apart” in the north end, the Liverpool-Irish had no desire for such cultural withdrawal and autarky. Perfecting their talents in “popular” sports and entertainment within their own “colony,” they took delight in beating the British in open competition at their own games—while hurling tournaments had to be postponed or abandoned for lack of teams, referees, and spectators, the Liverpool-Irish delighted in the soccer triumphs of the Old Xaverians, not least in defeating the Liverpool Casuals before a crowd of five thousand at Goodison Park to secure the Lancashire Amateur League in 1903.Footnote 34

In the prototypical pattern of race relations in Liverpool, identification between the Irish and nonwhite groups was transient, restricted to a specific period of time within the “diaspora space” of the world port city, former capital of the slave trade and gateway of empire. At an individual level, identification doubtless continued, personified by Mary Ellen Grant, the “Connaught Nigger” with an Irish mother and West African father, the most notorious (and feared) of the female moneylenders in the Edwardian slums.Footnote 35 By this time, however, the Liverpool-Irish had withdrawn into whiteness, within which construction they were better positioned not for assimilation but for a gamut of “racial” strategies of negotiation ranging from enclave autonomy (or local “home rule”) through competition to outright challenge of the “Saxon” host.