1. Imagined Irish Communities: Networks of Social Communication of the Irish Diaspora in the United States and Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
- Author
-
Alan O'Day
- Subjects
Social communication ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Immigration ,Ethnic group ,Identity (social science) ,Gender studies ,language.human_language ,Nationalism ,Diaspora ,Irish ,language ,Ethnology ,Linkage (linguistics) ,Sociology ,Demography ,media_common - Abstract
The discussion in this essay clarifies three neglected aspects of the comparative destinies of the Irish in America and Great Britain. First, it explores an apparent if generally unrecognised discrepancy between theories of nationalism and those of ethnicity, attempting to close a loophole in the literature. Secondly, it assesses what being Irish meant to the networks bridging the diasporic experience in the old country and adopted lands. Thirdly, it looks at tours overseas, mainly to the United States, by nationalist figures from the vantage point of the formation of an imagined community or network. It is suggested that the disjunction and a degree of misunderstanding about the networking process arises because the literature presumes an already existing or nearly formed Irish Catholic identity among the immigrants on arrival in new lands. Charles Stewart Parnell's trip in early 1880 also allows elucidation of theoretical paradigms. This linkage of theory and a specific form of ethnic networking yields ...
- Published
- 2005
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