Relocations: Diaspora, Travel, Migrancy

This is the final version. Available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.This chapter addresses a central dynamic in contemporary Irish culture, the relationship between Ireland and the rest of the world. A long history of emigration has made for a massive global Irish diaspora. These decades have seen the emergence of new critical approaches to the writing and culture of the Irish diaspora in Britain, the United States, and across the world. In addition, a number of Irish writers have spent much of their time writing about places other than Ireland (whether or not they happened to be living there at the time). This chapter takes on two related themes: recent Irish literature’s interest in representing spaces and conditions outside of Ireland, and the relationship between contemporary Irish literature and the global Irish diaspora

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: SCULLY, M., 2012. The tyranny of transnational discourse: 'authenticity' and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England. Nations and Nationalism, 18 (2), pp.191-209, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00534.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of 'diaspora' and 'transnationalism'. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of 'diaspora' and 'transnationalism'. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second-generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and 'lived' diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement

Networking sisterhood, from the informal to the global: AkiDwA, the African and Migrant Women's Network, Ireland

In this article we document the networking strategies of Ireland's leading migrant women's organization, AkiDwA - the African and Migrant Women's Network. We begin by positing networking as a process of agency and transformation and argue for the heuristic potential of 'network' in unpacking the gendered experiences of migration. Employing theoretical and ethnographic tools, we position AkiDwA as key to understanding how migrant women have been addressing discrimination, isolation, exclusion, violence and racism, through promoting gendered and culturally sensitive services and policies. We outline three phases in AkiDwA's development since the onset of immigration in the 1990s, from the informal to the global, situating it as the hub of overlapping national and global networks of migrant women, spanning Ireland, Europe and beyond. We conclude by suggesting that network analysis, rather than being a general grand theory, allows us to develop the micro-macro links that, as Robert Holton argues, bring together small worlds with larger structures. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership