Chapter 9 “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”: the Relation between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation1
In: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and CultureSearch for other papers by Patricia San José Rico in
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Abstract
When dealing with notions of immigration and hospitality, there is a third concept that often unavoidably follows suit: that of the Other. Usually identified with what is different, what is not understood as equal to the self and/or its inherent cultural, linguistic, or racial identity, the Other is perceived as an outsider, someone—or something—that, due to its difference, is often feared and most of the times not welcome into the domain/territory of the self. Likewise, the concept of race is also unmistakably linked to that of the Other, as the former embodies what can perhaps be conceived as the most obvious and identifiable of differences: a visible mark of otherness that is, by definition, inextricably engrained within the alien individual.
Certain past—and present—discourses on migration have capitalized on the relation between notions of otherness, race, and the migrant as an intruder and a perceived need of self-preservation in order to reinforce and implement several anti-immigration policies, which are, in turn, often paralleled in the society’s rejecting attitude towards those immigrants. In the case of the US, instances of such practices against the racialized immigrant have been evident in the Asian Immigration Ban implemented during a good part of the twentieth century, or the Anti-immigration rants that President Trump frequently directs towards Mexicans, among other examples.
One of those other examples is the attitude towards the Irish immigrants that arrived in the US during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even though there are apparently little linguistic and racial differences between the Irish and the white population of the US, the Irish’s whiteness was by no means taken for granted during the better part of that period. And yet, unlike other racialized groups of immigrants—as well as other ‘resident’ collectives like the African Americans or the Native Americans—the Irish were able to achieve the recognition of whiteness that they had been previously denied.
Based on the works of previous scholars like Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1996), this chapter will trace the Irish trip towards whiteness in the US and the efforts of its individuals across generations to achieve it. To illustrate this process, examples of its representation in novels depicting the Irish-American experience such as Frank McCourt’s ’Tis (1999), Mary Gordon’s The Other Side (1989), and Taylor Caldwell’s Captains and the Kings (1972) will be employed.