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 introduction surveys the state of contemporary Irish and Northern Irish literature and culture from the close of the twentieth century to the present day, exploring how Irish writing reflects and intervenes in rapidly changing contemporary cultural conditions, both local and global. It helps to explain the national and international significance of Irish contemporary writing in the twenty-first century and focuses on the increasing authority of formerly marginalized voices, particularly those of women, LGBTQ, and migrant artists. It homes in on how durable artistic and cultural legacies are reshaped by contemporary writers, how the altered cultural conditions of a socially progressive Republic and a post-Troubles Northern Ireland are represented by writers in a variety of genres, and how Irish writers and artists invoke new aesthetic forms and practices to depict the contemporary moment.