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This essay will analyse the ways in which definitions of race in nineteenth-century Ireland were not only, nor simply set by British colonizers, but rather were produced and determined by Irish people themselves. This long history of Irish engagement with concepts of race shaped how the Young Ireland movement understood how the Irish nation was (racially) constituted. Additionally, the multi-racial history of the Irish nation inflected Young Ireland's understanding of how history structured the construction of an Irish nationality. This paper then will show how the Young Irelanders understood race and, more particularly, how they recognized themselves as racialized subjects. Their own adoption of a racialized Irishness was important to their vision for Ireland's revolutionary future. Placing race centrally within the writings of Young Ireland, highlighting its essential role in a historical account of Irish nationality, this essay will thereby cast new light on the difficulties inherent in Young Ireland's nationalist project. In particular, it will underscore the anxieties experienced by Young Ireland about the potential impossibility of the nationalist project with reference to its production and experience of racialized but ambiguous subject positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with John Mitchel's engagement with questions around race as articulated in his 1854 Jail Journal. Mitchel has been oft noted and condemned for his support of the Confederacy during the US Civil War, in which he lost two of his sons. His racism as it was articulated in the Southern Citizen during that period and his defence of slavery as an institution has led to numerous and open disavowals of his legacy. This article seeks to trace the development of Mitchel's attitude towards race through a close reading of his Jail Journal in conjunction with a contemporaneous racist tract by Thomas Carlyle. This double reading will expose some of the ambiguities and ambivalences in Mitchel's thinking in contrast to the strident pro-slavery position that he later embraced, whilst also allowing for an uncovering of his modus cogitandi that may help to explain apparent contradictions within his thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]