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.

Jeanne Morefield maintains that a truly democratic response to the crisis of liberal democracy requires citizens in the global North to embrace a radically reflective, deconstructive subjectivity that relentlessly calls into question the historical and contemporary shape of “the people” under consideration. To develop this subjective perspective, the chapter draws upon Edward Said’s notion of exilic criticism and compares it with contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism and left populism. Morefield explores the way this unhoused, unstable perspective enables contrapuntal engagement with those histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, and racialized logics of extraction and dispossession that went into the creation of modern liberal democratic states in the first place. Ultimately, she argues, it is only by reflecting on this constitutive history that citizens in the global North can create the kind of solidaristic, compassionate, and authentically democratic practices necessary to fight the rise of white nationalism and the decline of liberal democracy on a global scale.

This chapter explores Trump’s language around immigration to determine how he manages to terrorize immigrants while arguing that immigrants should be the source of America’s terror. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and over 300 speeches and 6,000 tweets, the authors find that Trump’s primary metaphor represents America as a fortress that is under attack, its cities and towns overrun by polluting invaders. Trump characterizes Mexico as the enemy that sent unauthorized immigrants to wreak havoc, and represents himself as the only hero who can save the nation. Along the way, the chapter explores Trump’s misleading extension of MS-13, the notorious gang, to all Latino gangs and even all young Latinos, and Trump’s extension of the phrase “criminal alien” (immigrants who commit felonious crimes) to all unauthorized immigrants. The authors draw parallels to related conceptual metaphors to be found in the history of Western ethnic nationalism, including Nazi Germany.

Though he may deny it, Trump’s statements and actions cumulatively point toward the notion that “making America great again” means bringing it back to an era of more overt White supremacy. And whiteness, for Trump, is mapped onto the English language and particular ways of speaking it, while White superiority is encoded in his word choices, his metaphors, and his mockery. Since several chapters in this section address the way language is weaponized in service of Trump’s authoritarian White nationalism, this section introduction furnishes some broader context from linguistic anthropology addressing how racism and xenophobia often play out in Trump’s language. These include his aversion to Arabic and Spanish, both of them stand-ins for native speakers; the covert and overt racism in his use of Mock Spanish (Hill 2008); and his dehumanizing word choice to describe immigrants as polluting and dangerous. All these techniques prove relevant as a backdrop to the chapters that follow.