This chapter traces Irish America’s place in the lineage of today’s white nationalist movement, to help explain the remarkable prominence of Irish American Catholics in contemporary America’s racist, alt-right movement, as well as the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Irish American Catholics are prominent also among Democratic Party’s progressive left-wing, too. However, given the history of vilification of Irish Catholic immigrants by hard-right groups such as the Know-Nothings in the nineteenth century and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the twentieth, the sheer number of Irish American extreme right-wingers has puzzled and merits deeper investigation. The chapter investigates how the Catholic Irish transmuted from a redundant, expendable people in the British colonial state in Ireland, to valuable American citizens, and ultimately white American nationals, through an analysis of the work of the most accomplished and prolific of all Irish American writers, Eugene O’Neill and James T. Farrell.

This chapter introduces the essays of this book and historicizes why a book on race in Irish literature and culture is of special significance at this contemporary moment in the twenty-first century. The editors signal the ubiquity of the concept of race in Irish letters and the changing iterations of that concept, especially since the Celtic Revival. Irishness has been compared and even equated to blackness to serve both colonial and nationalist agendas. However, in Revivalist and post-Celtic Tiger discourses, the racial imaginary surrounding Irishness has also been silenced in telling ways. This essay connects the dots between these divergent histories to narrativize a critical position that aids a decolonial framing of the subject of race, Irish literature, and Irish culture. Such a decolonial endeavor is especially urgent at a time when fascist nationalisms and white supremacy are becoming key geopolitical registers. It is also a time when Irish whiteness is being scrutinized and when Black Irishness is gaining recognition. This is a unique moment in the history of Ireland, and it is partly because of the growing crescendo of cultural identification by a biracial population within Ireland.

This chapter examines the role played by Irish American Catholic novels published between 1830 and 1880 in the US nation-building project. The novels of what Charles Fanning has labelled the ‘Famine Generation’ dominate the period in question. Famine Irish American literature has been considered insular, aimed primarily at keeping alienated immigrant readers within the Catholic flock. The literature’s US nation-building role has been ignored by Americanists and Irish studies scholars alike. This chapter strives to correct that anomaly. Situating Famine Irish writing firmly within the unfolding narrative of the US racial state, it shows the ways in which the Famine generation of Irish American writers performed crucial ideological functions on behalf of the US state.

In the early nineteenth century, the American Catholic Church was largely dominated by French and German priests and bishops, many associated with a particular religious order. By 1850, Irish bishops – many trained in Rome – controlled most of the church. This chapter examines how this happened and with what consequences.