According to one Scottish friend, the famed American author William Faulkner “saw himself as a highlander living in exile in Mississippi” (120). Like his fellow southern-born writers Margaret Mitchell and Frank Yerby, Faulkner could claim both “pre-Famine Irish or Scottish Gaelic descent” (103). Those shared ethnic pasts infused the plantation novels and “broadly Irish” fictional planters they created, figures which Mary M. Burke’s rich analysis unpacks (103). First and foremost, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History is a work of Irish American studies, literature and cultural analysis – although not a conventional history, it adds further depth to burgeoning micro-interdisciplinary studies of Irish America.

Burke’s cultural intellectualism presents new analysis of familiar figures – the five chapters focus on well-worn individuals like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Eugene O’Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are also intriguing discussions of Grace Kelly, the Kennedys and even briefly Presidents Obama and Biden. Burke evaluates how their respective Irishness in all variations impacted their lives and outputs both consciously and subconsciously, questioning whether they fit mainstream models of “Irish American” defined by different pre-/during-/post-Famine generations, which often delineates diaspora scholarship. This is a book about people and biographies more than about their creative outputs; it is about reading the latter to find the former, and the various ways “race … representations of Irishness … [and] fraught Irish-American negotiations of race, gender and sexuality” were framed (1).

The Gothic lens Burke takes provides interesting methodological framing. “Broadly defined, Gothic is fiction with a grotesque, sinister, or claustrophobic atmosphere in which the vanquished, the past, or the dead return. This basic definition fits both American and Anglo-Irish Gothic literature” (24), Burke suggests. Having family from Ireland, “being Irish” or “being Scots-Irish/Ulster-Scots” thus haunts the books, novellas and plays scrutinized in each chapter as much as it haunts the hands that penned them. Take the godfather of American Gothic Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, whose Baltimore paternal grandfather was born in County Cavan, who had ancestors involved in the 1600s plantation of Ulster, and who had Virginian maternal relatives originating from Scotland. Poe’s “convoluted family origins are emblematic” of the merging of Ulster-Scots and Irish identity that Burke analyses both separately and together throughout – a change from Irish transnational scholarship that tends to focus on just one dominant group at a time (25). These descendants also followed the very Gothic trait that violence was visited upon the self – which “could serve as a one-line summary of Poe’s oeuvre” and indeed summarize the Gothic Irish America Burke creates (25). The collective “baggage of sectarianism, colonialism, and trauma brought with Irish deportees and immigrants from the disordered motherland” passed onto these writers, repeatedly haunting the characters they created and their connections to the green-tinted island of Ireland (3).

Even the present seems to have longer temporal Irish roots. Eugene O’Neill’s play Desire under the Elms, for example, focuses on “the disputed ownership” of the protagonists’ family. This plot point, Burke reveals, “takes on symbolic value in light of what would have been the recent Partition of Ireland at the time of the play’s premier” in 1924 (79). O’Neill was “raised in conformable Irish-American homes and … mindful of [his] immigrant routes,” as was his contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald (63) – though the latter left his paternal ancestry “unexplored in print” beyond his grandfather’s generation (82). O’Neill “critique[d] the Irish presence in the Americas over centuries” and how his brethren had failed “to create solidarity with their fellow oppressed, especially peoples of colour,” in his work (63). His 1924 play All God’s Chillun Got Wings featured the first interracial couple on Broadway (leading to the O’Neill family facing KKK threats).

When some of the analysis moves away from literary studies, Burke’s use of current scholarship over the last decade is noticeably missing. On aspects of the 1850s to 1870s for instance, the works of Damian Shiels, David Gleeson, Susannah Ural, Sophie Cooper, Catherine Bateson, Christian Samito and Cathal Smith are absent, particularly when large sections of Burke’s own analysis are so directly reliant on the works of others. The discussion of famed Young Irelander John Mitchel’s lack of any “common cause with African Americans” is too mild and forgiving in its assessment, failing to tackle fully his known staunch slavery defences and ardent Confederate support, which contemporary historical scholarship now emphasizes (62). There is also missed opportunity to draw connections between the real Mitchel and the fictional Gerald O’Hara – father of Scarlett. Gone with the Wind’s patriarch, like the Irish nationalist, “sees no connection between the sectarian oppression in Ireland that he had fled and the South’s slave system” in Georgia (108). On the ever-controversial Margaret Mitchell epic, much has already, of course, been written (most recently Sarah Churchwell’s 2022 The Wrath to Come). Here “the tome is considered, not just as a bad faith interpretation of African-American history but, consequently, as a bad faith rendering of Irish history too” (102). For better or worse, the book and its film adaptation remain in the pantheon of works in the American zeitgeist generated by Irish and Ulster-Scots descendants. That significance comes to the fore with Frank Yerby, who “became the first African American to have a book purchased for screen adaptation by a major Hollywood studio.” The Foxes of Harrow became a 1947 Rex Harrison-led film; Yerby’s father was African American while his mother was of Scots-Irish ancestry (132).

Grace Kelly provides the most tragic Irish American Gothic example: born to an elite Philadelphian family who rose from Famine-era descendants via her County Mayo-born grandfather. Her crowning Hollywood triumphs would go higher still by her becoming Princess of Monaco, achieving an Irish – and American – global success long before the Kennedy family (though Burke does erase some of Joe Kennedy’s political/ambassadorial rise). As with all of the examples analysed in this compressive study, Burke redresses the need to study Kelly in her Irish/Irish American context. It is an identity that remains strong through cultural memory in Monaco to this day thanks to the Princess Grace Irish Library, which champions Irish diaspora work past, present and future. It is a fitting example – a library for an Irish American with the message of reading more, Gothic and otherwise, which Burke’s study encourages.