Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic addresses itself to a set of quite recent concerns in the study of transatlantic relations between Ireland and the Americas: the possible intersections and/or similarities between Paul Gilroy's model of the black Atlantic as a “counterculture of modernity” and what has alternately been termed the “Irish” or “green” Atlantic. Luke Gibbons was an early proponent of this idea; quoting Gilroy's claim that the traumatic legacy of the slave experience “marked out blacks as the first truly modern people,” Gibbons wrote in Transformations in Irish Culture (1996, 6) that due to “a similar uprooting of Irish experience after the atrocities of the 1798 rebellion and the devastation of the Great Famine, Irish literature in the nineteenth century (especially in its romantic or gothic register) often evinced a ‘proto-modernist’ outlook” (6). Since then, a number of articles and books – which Gough cites (8) – have taken up the idea.

Gough's work focusses on five historical “flashpoints” in the relationship between the black and green Atlantics: anti-slavery and Irish anticolonialism (mid-nineteenth century), Jim Crow and the “Irish Question” (1870–1900), the Irish and Harlem Renaissances (1900–30), the African American and Northern Irish Civil Rights movements (1955–70), and the globalization of “Celtic Tiger” Ireland (2000s). While some of these moments have previously received scholarly attention (I am thinking, for example, of Tracy Mishkin's (cultural) and George Bornstein's (historical) work on African American–Irish relations in the early twentieth century) and Lauren Onkey's Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity (2012) is similarly structured around key moments in transatlantic relations, Gough's exclusive focus on performance – broadly conceived – does yield some original and valuable insights that significantly advance scholarship in this area. Indebted to Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead (1996), Gough applies Roach's idea of “surrogation” to black Atlantic–green Atlantic relations. For Roach (2), surrogation is the process by which survivors of “loss through death or other forms of departure” attempt “to fit satisfactory alternates” into the cavities created by such losses. Thus, at various moments of crisis, African Americans and Irish have reciprocally sought, in each other, both political and cultural national surrogates (Frederick Douglass/Daniel O'Connell; Marcus Garvey/Eamon de Valera). Gough's major contribution, here, is to highlight that “in order for the concept and practice of surrogacy to ‘travel,’ it requires woman-as-allegory (and far too often woman-as-national-allegory) to remain still, fixed and immobile” (9). In other words, Gough is particularly interested in uncovering the extent to which black Atlantic–green Atlantic relations are gendered. For Gough, the woman “seems to hold her place, so that comparative and intercultural relations can be worked out ‘man to man’” (7).

The analysis that follows is often fascinating. For example, in chapter 5, Gough juxtaposes Wine in the Wilderness (1969), a televised play by African American playwright Alice Childress that adapts Sean O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), with the controversial tour of the United States by Northern Ireland civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin – herself “theatricalized,” alternately, as Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Antigone – at the same historical moment. By placing these two very different performances in dialogue with one another, Gough reveals “the challenges of using female theatrical characters and political actors to frame a revolutionary politics” (139). While much scholarship has been devoted to rhetorical and imaginative connections between African American and Northern Irish civil rights movements, I have not encountered an intervention on the subject as original and persuasive as Gough's.

There is, then, much of value in Gough's book. However, I would like to have seen a more thoroughgoing interrogation of what is at stake in employing the term “black and green Atlantic.” In other words, while Gough persuasively lays bare the gendered aspects of black Atlantic–green Atlantic relations, the term “black and green Atlantic” itself is taken for granted. Gough, by her own admission, works “by way of analogy.” She claims that “analogy does not elide difference but looks for ‘kinship’ so that difference does not become a way to curtail the possibility of seeking ‘both/and’ in place of ‘either/or’” (7). But as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford has put it so elegantly in Ireland's Others (2002, 133), analogies can be “slippery things: one man's sympathetic identification is another woman's ‘cannibalistic’ appropriation, and the construction of aesthetic parallels that elide historical differences or asymmetries of power may appear racist or falsely totalizing.” The dangers of such elisions are underscored by David Lloyd, who acknowledges in his introduction to The Black and Green Atlantic (2009, xvi) that the “experiences of racialization and citizenship” undergone by Irish and African Americans “not only differed utterly but were constituted differentially.” A similar kind of acknowledgement would have been welcome here. Overall, though, Gough's book is an engaging, lively and original contribution to this expanding area of transatlantic studies.