Caribbean Irish Connections ― Interdisciplinary Perspectives

This collection of provocative new essays from interdisciplinary perspectives seeks to end familiar narratives that regard the Irish as undesirables according to the English--disempowered, their “whiteness” questioned--and opens the door on new viewpoints regarding the Irish presence in the Caribbean, which began in the seventeenth century. Seventeen chapters are divided into three parts: histories of encounter and exchange; cultural performance and exchange; comparative readings and critical encounters. Chapters are: a changing presence; Father Antoine Biet’s account revisited; the Irish in Barbados; liberty, freedom and the green Atlantic; Irish encounters with the Jamaican plantocracy, 1814-1838; entanglements of root and branch; historic and contemporary Irish identity on Montserrat; cataloguing Ireland; Pamela Colman Smith’s performative primitivism; the final fortress; water songs; the haunted ocean; Que diga perejil/Abair broagh; Medbh McGuckian’s Shelmalier and Dionne Brand’s Inventory; “two tunes”; mutual obsessions; rewriting Heathcliff. Distributed by Longleaf Services, Inc. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)