Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History

Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History

Prof. Mary Burke (University of Connecticut)

The Irish in America racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America’s frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along the eastern seaboard. This paper considers the cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas, looking at the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America’s contexts of race.