A flurry of recent books centralize racial encounter as a feature of Irish experience in both Ireland and the United States. Among them are Jennifer Nugent Duffy's Who's Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish-American Identity (2013), Zelie Asava's The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (2013) and this new text by Sinead Moynihan. This welcome set of evaluations recharges Irish and American studies with a set of rich questions and concerns. Moynihan's particular contention that multicultural Celtic Tiger Ireland thought its way through social diversification by making constant conceptual recourse to the Irish experience abroad is a sturdy and productive one. During this period of rapid cultural change in which the nation's image of itself was acutely assessed and contested, a paradox emerged: was Ireland a euphoric nation freeing itself from historical limitations or a recidivist one responding to immigration with self-protective racist rhetoric?

As Moynihan shows, the prevalence of the mixed-race subject in this period was one sign of the circulation of such questions. As she notes, “racial sympathy can frequently translate into appropriation, political paralysis, or antipathy” (107) and “black–Irish analogies have helped to bolster Irishness as a ‘tragically hip’ identity (67–68), but that does not preclude such analogies sometimes opening up meaningful political dialogues. Moynihan dexterously parses the ideological functions of cross-racial solidarities, noting that the existence of “a Green Atlantic authenticates itself by its assumed relationship to the Black Atlantic” (42, original emphasis) and “appeals to the mixed-race subject as embodying the possibilities of a multiracial Ireland invite as many representational problems as they appear to resolve” (59). In illustration she points to the case of Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, a national icon and seeming guarantor of the possibilities of multicultural Ireland whose early death from drug use nonetheless also conforms to the stock narrative of the tragic mulatto.

Moynihan's well-wrought scholarly arguments draw productively on prior work in postcolonial and critical race studies. She is keenly aware of the intellectual genealogies of her study and well able to explicate them while forthrightly setting out her own interventions. The book is scrupulously researched and constitutes a valuable synthesis of key ideas across the terrain of Irish cultural, literary and media studies. A significant strength is its intermediality and it moves fleetly between various different kinds of case study. Moynihan's chapters focalize cinema (notably The Nephew and In America), theatre (particularly The Blowin of Baile Gall and The Cambria), print fiction (singling out works by Roddy Doyle and Joseph O'Connor) and stand-up comedy (as practised by Ireland-based Irish American Des Bishop).

The dynamics of diaspora cultures are often oversimplified but Moynihan's account is adept and considered at every stage. Her starting point is the recognition that “one of the most palpable trends in Irish culture of the Celtic Tiger years was the juxtaposition, literal or implied, of narratives of Irish emigration to the United States with those of immigration to Ireland” (2, original emphasis), but her analysis expands outward in numerous ways and the affinities and disaffinities between US and Irish cultural production offer fertile critical ground. The arguments here take on a heightened charge in an era of renewed emigration giving rise to a “new diaspora.” Moynihan reminds us that the term “Celtic Tiger” was in fact coined by a Morgan Stanley banker and it would be beneficial to say more about how narratives of a high-tech, business-friendly Ireland (adamantly committed to low corporate taxation) function to neutralize concerns about race and gender.

Material from many of the chapters was previously published in journal articles yet they comprise a compelling synthesis here and the book is enriched by an epilogue which poses a number of rich, resonant questions opening up fruitful paths for future research. If some of the observations in this section aren't quite as current as we might wish (Moynihan hypothetically speculates at one point about how a potential return to the “bad old days” of high unemployment and emigration would be captured in the national imagination, yet that return is now fully in evidence) this is due only to the temporal gap between writing and publication.

Other People's Diasporas charts with acuity a phase of cultural representation that moved in tandem with “a shift in the status of the Irish as an ambiguously raced ethnic group in Britain, the United States and elsewhere to a white, European ethnic group unwilling to share the spoils of sudden and unprecedented economic prosperity” (192). It enriches the literature in contemporary Irish and American studies and will be of interest to a range of readers in those fields and beyond.