The New World Studies Series from the University of Virginia Press publishes groundbreaking scholarship that challenges and expands unitary and exceptionalist notions of “American” literature and culture. The series is at the cutting edge of new American studies that since the mid-1990s have exchanged a reductive and exclusionary national narrative for a polyvocal and intranational paradigm of the Americas and of the relationships between America, understood in an expanded sense, and the wider world. Transatlantic Solidarities is a fine addition to the list. Michael Malouf has produced an exemplary work of cross-cultural criticism that is as alert to Irish and Caribbean solidarities as it is resistant to too-easy conflations of very real and material differences in national, historical, and individual experience.
The connections Malouf posits between Caribbean and Irish cultural politics and aesthetics are often imaginative—for instance, his account of Sinéad O’Connor's engagement with Jamaican reggae—but never speculative or specious because, throughout, the transatlantic explorations of Transatlantic Solidarities are anchored in meticulous and extensive empirical and archival research (Malouf's notes, alone, offer rich pickings for future work in this vein). Malouf refuses the temptation to impose a narrative of affiliation in which there is no such clear story to tell, and his argument is the stronger for the gaps and ambivalences it reveals.
Transatlantic Solidarities is one of several recent texts that owe a debt to, even as they move beyond the contours of, Paul Gilroy's seminal study, The Black Atlantic (London, 1993). Malouf expands Gilroy's paradigm to explore the ways in which “Caribbean ‘routes and roots’ sometimes use Irish ‘political and cultural vessels’ for their expressions” (13). Malouf's book navigates a black and green Atlantic, or “circum-Atlantic” (5), and offers a redemptive counter-narrative to the often vexed and sometimes murderous historical relations among Ireland, black America, and the “Other Emerald Isles” of the Caribbean (2). Malouf also adeptly extends Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant's theory of the “multiple series of relationships” that constitute the Caribbean (2), and in doing so issues a challenge, if for the most part an implicit one, to Irish studies, a field in which the postcolonial turn remains contested and an area that with some significant exceptions remains insular, even in the extranational dimension Ireland shares with the West Indies as an immigrant culture. Like Tracy Mishkin's study, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances (Gainesville, FL, 1997), Malouf's comparative analysis is stronger by some measure in its New World component than in the Irish dimension of its remit, albeit Malouf insists that he does consider “the Irish side of the street” (176). Malouf analyzes Caribbean solidarities with Irish nationalist discourse from Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey in the 1910s and 1920s through Derek Walcott's affinities with the Irish in the 1980s. Walcott is perhaps a predictable choice—his relationship to Irish poetics has been discussed by Jahan Ramazani among others—whereas the inclusion of a less tractable figure like the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite, who regularly invokes Yeats in his work (or, indeed, Eric Roach, the Tobago-born so-called Black Yeats), would have added a fresher dimension to the book.
Transatlantic Solidarities opens with a survey of “the similar places of Ireland and Jamaica within the worldview of the British empire” (21). Malouf examines a text that is often cited but seldom properly explicated in comparative studies of this kind, Thomas Carlyle's pamphlet of 1848, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, and its analogy between the Irish Famine and contemporaneous labor problems in Jamaica. Carlyle's is an incendiary comparison but, as Malouf comments, one in which racial hierarchies are nonetheless maintained. Malouf moves on to a discussion of the historian and apologist for empire J. A. Froude and the “precise parallel” he identified in The Bow of Ulysses (1888) between colonial subjects in Ireland and the West Indies (30). Malouf is sensitive to the “Problems with Parallels” between colonial histories (41): he is attentive, for instance, to the vexed issue of whether an analogy between Irish and West Indian experience can, contra Carlyle and Froude, be progressive “since the act of validating resemblance among the peripheries also reasserts the authority of the colonial power that created the conditions for comparison” (41). Instead, Malouf favors what he terms “the strange cosmopolitanism of colonial contexts” (43) as a meeting ground for intersecting concerns and histories.
The following chapter offers what will surely be cited as the definitive study of Marcus Garvey's extrapolations and appropriations from the discourse of Irish nationalism propagated in the United States by Eamon de Valera and revivified in the course and wake of the martyrdom of the hunger-striking mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney. Malouf demonstrates convincingly the selective ways in which Garvey “revised the transnational history of Irish resistance as a means of fashioning his own transnational movement in nationalist terms” (45). Malouf moves on to consider, in close and illuminating detail, the material and practical results of Garvey's study of Irish nationalism in exile: “For Garvey's UNIA and Eamon de Valera's Sinn Féin, their respective bond drives were a means of mobilizing diaspora communities around images of a symbolic return” (9).
The focus of Malouf's third chapter is Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay and his long-standing relationship with Irish nationalism. Some of this is familiar territory: what Malouf brings to the discussion is his identification of Jamaican governor Sydney Olivier as the source of McKay's “discursive solidarity with Irish nationalism” (87). Malouf convincingly traces McKay's later and apparently atavistic expressions of solidarity with “peasant” Ireland—a shared convergence of literature and land—to his own rural Jamaican roots. McKay's later career, for example (in particular the extraordinary 1929 novel Banjo), is read in the terms of “a transnational political space shared by black internationalism and Irish nationalism” (100). Malouf champions here, as he does throughout his book, the “transnational dimension of anticolonial nationalism” (123). A vivid example is found in the sexual and vernacular energies of Banjo's “bad” nationalism (118).
The next chapter takes as its focus Derek Walcott's cosmopolitan reinvention of the Caribbean and his use of Joyce to lay claim to his own locality. That place of origin is transformed, through negative solidarity with Joyce, into a cosmopolitan geography—Joyce's rejection of Irish localism, that is, informs Walcott's own Caribbean cosmopolitanism. Malouf thus reinflects discussions of Walcott's uses of allusion, but arguably he fails to add much of substance to other cross-cultural readings of Walcott's Omeros. The last chapter of Transatlantic Solidarities, though, on Irish-Caribbean popular culture, is highly innovative. The discussion of Stewart Parker's Kingdom Come, a “humorous Irish-Caribbean musical” (182), is adroitly handled, as is the analysis of Sinéad O’Connor's better-known “Celtic Rastafarianism,” which follows (189). O’Connor, in fact, emerges from this book as, after Garvey, the most accomplished and engaged theorist of “Green on Black” (the title she considered for her 2001 Faith and Courage recordings). Malouf's epilogue considers Yeats, Lorna Goodison, and an Irish-Jamaican poetics of affiliation, but, like the Walcott chapter, this returns us to ground already mapped, to some extent, by other critics. Notwithstanding this, however, Transatlantic Solidarities is a fascinating and accomplished study of the limits, as well as the possibilities, of the cross-cultural dynamics to which it contributes.
