Call for papers: Movements in Irish Landscape: Diaspora, Identity and Globalization

Call For Papers: Movements in Irish Landscapes: Diaspora, Identity, and Globalization at Home and Away

Movements in Irish Landscapes" proposes to examine cultural, material, and symbolic articulations of underrepresented migration relationships within Ireland. Using an interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework, the book will address these articulations across Ireland’s history. The edited collection seeks to explore Irish people’s different uses of social space, their relationships with and memories of the landscape, as well as their symbolic expressions of diasporic identity. We, the editors, are seeking case studies that not only periodize diaspora and globalization, but also contribute to contemporary debates on home, foreignness, and consumption.

Currently, much of the literature on Ireland and its diaspora focuses on mass emigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. The significance of this mass emigration, mostly a result of famine and labor exportation, can be seen globally in scholarship, arts and literature, memorials and other forms of popular culture in multiple genres. Many conversations focus on the spirit of Irish migrants and their descendants and their memories associated with family separation, discrimination and adaptation in new landscapes. While these areas are incredibly important, this limited focus overshadows other migration relationships with Ireland. Such work also tends to cast contemporary migrations as “new” movements in a perceived monocultural country, casting immigrants to Ireland within a binary of Irish/non-Irish.

The book aims to respond to and move beyond these dominant understandings of Ireland’s 19th and 20th century migrations. By examining longer term movements of people into and out of Ireland, we wish to explore how expressions of cultural capital and symbolic power have evolved in the Irish imagination. In exploring underrepresented narratives, the book will challenge the more traditional interpretations of Irish migrations as solely a 19th and 20th century outward phenomenon. As such the book seeks to draw on multiple temporal frameworks such as medieval, early modern, and contemporary.

We seek papers which will address some of the following themes:

expressions of home and location in the diaspora
how immigrants and emigrants produce and reflect their memory, identity and material culture
the impact of global culture and consumption on diasporic processes
how the processes of movement affect the ways in which people negotiate and contest concepts of identity, the local and the global.
discourses of memory and oral history
the importance of ‘landscapes’, both geographical and ideological
how notions of Ireland are memorialized, commemorated or abhorred in material culture

Some examples we encourage you to think about include, but are not limited to:

- Living wakes (also called American or Irish wakes) and the impact of impending emigration of family members in Ireland
- The strategies labor emigrants develop(ed) to cope with family separation, adaptation in new landscapes, discrimination
- Feminist politics of representation in art
- Re-examination of historic Irish movements that are not alway seen as “migrations” such as the Flight of the Earls, arrival of the Vikings, or colonization by the English
- How material culture was used to express feelings of belonging or alienation, membership of a group, or isolation from others, for example the wearing of Irish-style brooches in 11th century Iceland
- How memories of the geography of home impacts upon the acceptance of life in a new geography, be that Irish emigrants in America or African immigrants in Ireland.
- How personal identities reflect or deny belonging to a migrant community.
- The use of the mother tongue to express migrant identities abroad (whether historic or contemporary), for example the establishment of a branch of the Gaelic League in Buenos Aires in 1899
- The methods of communication (or lack of communication) between migrant communities and their homelands, ranging from email, to telephone, to telegram, to letter.
- Historical and/or contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric in Ireland
- Maintaining links with home through naming practices - personal and surnames, nicknames, or place-names.

We invite scholars working on any of these themes to submit an abstract of up to 500 words to Rebecca Boyd and Diane Nititham-Tunney on or before 5 August 2012. Please include a short biography and contact details. Completed chapters (7,000-8,000 words) are expected by 10 November 2012.

Contributors, please send the following in a Word Document to rebeccaiboyd@gmail.com and nititham.tunney@gmail.com by 5 August:
Proposed Chapter Title
Abstract (500 words)
Short Biography
Contact details

Contact: Diane Sabenacio Nititham-Tunney (nititham.tunney@gmail.com) and Rebecca Boyd (rebeccaiboyd@gmail.com)

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=195598