Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture

This groundbreaking collection reframes how popular culture in Ireland and Ireland in popular culture can be understood. The essays examine in unique ways, local and global Irishness, focusing on current versions of traditional culture and new modes of representation, how issues such as gender, sexuality, and race shape contemporary postmodernism in Ireland. From Fanfic to Orange Parades, from Boybands to the Blessed Virgin Mary, from Celebrity Tourism to the Gaelic Athletic Association, the essays address new territories.

WANDA BALZANO is Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Wake Forest University, USA. She has published essays on Beckett, Joyce, Irish women’s writing in theory, religion, art, and film, and she has co-edited the special issue of The Irish Review on ‘Feminisms’.
ANNE MULHALL is AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Women in Irish Culture Project, based at University College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Her research focuses on critical theory, particularly feminist and queer theory, popular culture, women’s writing in Ireland, and seventeenth-century literature and culture.
MOYNAGH SULLIVAN is Lecturer in the Department of English, National University of Ireland (NUI), Maynooth, Republic of Ireland. She has published a number of articles on gender, women’s writing and Irish studies, and is co-editor of the special issue of The Irish Review on ‘Feminisms’, Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland.

Acknowledgements * Notes on Contributors * Introduction * PART I: Race * Not Irish Enough? Masculinity and Ethnicity in The Wire and Rescue Me–Gerardine Meaney * Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann–Maureen T.Reddy * Marching, Minstrelsy, Masquerade: Parading White Loyalist Masculinity as ‘Blackness’–Suzanna Chan * ‘Is it for the Glamour?’: Masculinity, Nationhood and Amateurism in Contemporary Projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association–Mike Cronin * PART II: Space * ‘Our Nuns are not a Nation’: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film–Elizabeth Butler Cullingford * Fanfic in Ireland: No Country, No Sex, No Money, No Name–Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka * Widening the Frame: the Politics of Mural Photography in Northern Ireland–Kathryn Conrad * Tracking the Luas between the Human and the Inhuman–Wanda Balzano & Jefferson Holdridge * PART III: Diaspora * Cinematic Constructions of Irish Musical Ethnicity–Christopher Smith * St Patrick’s Day Expulsions: Race and Homophobia in New York’s Parade–Katherine O’Donnell * Fantasy, Celebrity and ‘Family Values’ in High-end and Special Event Tourism in Ireland–Diane Negra * A Mirror up to Irishness: Hollywood Hard Men and Witty Women–Claire Bracken & Emma Radley * PART IV: Aporia * ‘Let’s Get Killed’: Culture and Peace in Northern Ireland–Colin Graham * Boyz to Men: Irish Boy Bands and Mothering the Nation–Moynagh Sullivan * Quare Theory–Noreen Giffney * Camping up the Emerald Aisle: ‘Queerness’ in Irish Popular Culture–Anne Mulhall * Index