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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]

While the role of religion in the production of nationalism has been subjected to uneven forms of scrutiny, most of these approaches rely on an implicit or explicit identification between sectarian affiliation and the dominant social group articulating a particular form of nationalism. This article will create a more nuanced picture by demonstrating the influence of a rhetoric of religiosity originating from a social group that generally resisted incorporation into a nationalist movement. It will do this by locating nineteenth century Irish nationalist John Mitchel firmly within a tradition of Presbyterianism at a time that his co-religionists were dominated by unionism and nationalism was taking on an increasingly Catholic orientation. This will show the difficulties of applying classic accounts of religion and nationalism to the Irish context. The ability of John Mitchel to intervene within the discursive space of nineteenth century Ireland is provocative in this context because of the implication that Mitchel's intervention would imply the existence of a non-sectarian social space through which confessional motifs could be exchanged and circulate with a regularity that is not often granted to Ireland due to the dominant tendency to view political and social conflict through a sectarian lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which death can be understood to occupy a formative function in the construction of Irish national identity. The analysis of three distinct moments in Irish history (Plantation-era funerary practices, the Great Famine, and the 1981 hunger strikes) is undertaken with recourse to Michel Foucault's understanding of race as it is deployed through disciplinary and biopower and Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics. The continuing concern with history in Irish political discourse is juxtaposed with Derrida's idea of 'hauntology'. It will be seen that the act of remembering politically carries with it an ambivalent legacy, exposing the violence at the heart of the establishment of both states in Ireland, while maintaining the potential of emancipatory promise. This promise is itself rooted in the violence implicated in the production of alterity through the historical experience of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores a hitherto neglected text on the history of India by leading nineteenth-century Irish nationalist Thomas Davis. India Her Own - And Another's marks an outright rejection of imperial fantasies of a civilizing mission motivating British involvement in India through an innovative reading of imperial texts. In India Her Own, Davis posits the "spirit of conquest" in direct opposition to the "spirit of nationality," which in turn is identified as kindred to freedom. It will be seen that Davis set up a dichotomy between conquest/empire and nationality/freedom which allows him to oppose imperial expansion without succumbing to notions of universalism or philanthropy. He sees in India's pre-imperial past a potential model for Ireland's future - one that could overcome ethnic tensions within the harmony of an ancient yet emergent nation. This marks an important contribution to how we understand the ambivalent discursive structures underpinning nascent anti-imperial ideological formations in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]