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Mary M. Burke, "Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:43:20
An interview with Mary M. Burke
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A
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B
Hello and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. My name is Aidan Beatty. I'm one of the co hosts of this channel. Today we're joined by Mary Burke, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut where she directs the Irish Literature concentration and publishes on Irish and Irish American culture, minorities and identities. Professor Burke's new book. Professor Burke's new book, Race, Politics and Irish A Gothic History, will be published in the US by Oxford University Press in March 2020, but is available for pre order for just $24 right now. This book examines various Irish immigrant cohorts through the words and lives of black and white writers and public figures. This follows on from Professor Burke's first book with Oxford University Press, which was a cultural history of the Irish traveler minority and her work in 2022, republishing with tramp Press, an edition of the Horse of a Last Classic by the traveler Romani novelist Juanita Casey. Professor Burke has had cover images and or lead articles in a number of journals in recent years, including the James Joyce Quarterly, and her public facing and creative work has been placed with npr, the Irish Times, RTE and Faber. She has served on Fulbright Screening committee for Ireland and is a former Notre Dame Irish Studies NEH Fellow, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University, Belfast. She was an LRH fellow at TCD in 2022 and will deliver the Fund for Irish Studies Public lecture at Princeton this coming March 2023. Professor Burke, thanks so much for joining us.
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C
Aidan, thank you very, very much for having me. I'm absolutely delighted to be here today.
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B
So, before we really get into the kind of nitty gritty of your book, could you give us just a general overview of what this book, Race Politics in Irish America, is all about?
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C
Sure. So it's, I suppose broadly it's a cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas. It surveys the forcibly transported 17th century Irish, the 18th century Presbyterian Ulster Scots, and the post 1845 famine immigrants. I suppose in particular, it examines portrayals of these Irish cohorts as both colluders and victims within America's structure of race. And I argue the Irish were racialized and then Vikings not once, as is often said, but multiple times. Irish encounters with native and African Americans in the Americas across centuries are central. However, the Irish themselves were racially transformed in the Americas, and I think that's really indicated by the designations they acquired in the slaveholding Caribbean on America's frontiers and antebellum plantation and along its eastern seaboard. And those designations are red legs, got iris and black iris.
- [03:58]
B
So I'll come back maybe later on in a few minutes to those three different designations that you use in your book. But can you tell us a little bit about which actual cultural figures you study? Because you obviously cover quite a broad array of people in this book.
- [04:14]
C
Yeah, so I try to cover a really diverse range of figures and of cultural productions too, not just fiction. So the book encompasses figures from the Ulster Irish, Andrew Jackson, President Jackson, to the family of the Caribbean Irish, Rihanna, along with dozens of writers, performers and public men and women. So this Irish pursuit of, you know, an unconditional whiteness that I, that I write about, it's both critiqued and sometimes condoned in, you know, fiction, drama, film, tv, guerrilla art, journalism, caricature, historiography, viral pseudo history exhibition, statuary, and even gravestone inscription. And because of the range, I was actually allowed by Oxford University Press to, to use to have 33 color illustrations, which I'm delighted by.
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B
So you're obviously using a fairly broad definition of Irish America. I mean, broad enough to include Andrew Jackson and Rihanna. They're sort of not usually bracketed together like that. What is your working definition of Irish America in this book?
- [05:22]
C
Well, I suppose first of all, the Irish, the term Irish America is often, I think unthinkingly, is solely to refer to the post 1845 salmon immigrant cohort alone, who were, you know, predominantly Catholic and Irish, Western seaboard in origin. But that I think it faces centuries of previous Irish presence in the Americas. Plural. I always stress the plural. So as I've noted, the Irish were racialized and subsequently whitened multiple times. And that began in the 17th century Slave plantation America. So it's important that I stress that the coinages for those of white Irish stock in the Americas, Redlegs, Scots Irish and Black Irish, that these have no traditional corollary in Ireland. In other words, these terms emerge from America's structures of race and ethnic hierarchy.
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B
So maybe if we kind of drill down into those different designations that you're using, can you explain, first of all, who were the red legs? How do they become known by that term?
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C
Yeah, so I'll start with the red legs and then I'll sort of move on to the Scots Irish. So red legs is the term applied to the Irish transported to the Caribbean. And this was due to their tendency to sunburn. And this is also, this term is actually still used of their contemporary descendants in the Caribbean. White Irish paleness became a racial liability in that context until strict differentiation between white transportee and enslaved African was codified. And so now I'll just move on to the Scots Irish. I'll try and keep it brief as well. So the Presbyterian Ulster Irish in America also acquired an ethno racial label when they became known as the Scots Irish. They were predominantly Presbyterians of Scottish descent who had settled land in Ulster, but subsequently the part of her colonial America in large numbers from the 18th century on. So the Ulster Irish attained only conditional whiteness in Benjamin Franklin's colony and on certain frontiers. And this was due, as Patrick Griffin argued, to their role as a buffer population situated somewhere between Native Americans and Europeans.
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B
And then maybe keeping with this problem of race that really runs through all of this, who exactly are this group of people that you call the Black Irish?
- [07:40]
C
Oh, so the Black Irish. So I look at the convoluted histories of this slippery term as used in the past in reference both to the marginalized white Irish in America and to Caribbean blacks of Irish descent or connection.
- [07:59]
B
And then when you look at people like Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and Frank Yerby, how do they fit into this very broad term then? Almost like fluid term.
- [08:10]
C
So that's a good question. So mixed race figures like the historian and memoirist Dunbar Ortiz, she is indigenous American, and Scott Irish and Also somebody very central to my work is a best selling mid century author, Frank Yerby, who is African American with some maternal Scots Irish antecedent. These people are both aware of the contentious history of the Irish with Americans of color and they deal with that complicated and for them, of course, that personal legacy in their writing.
- [08:41]
B
And you make the argument that Yerby, despite being of maternal Scots Irish ancestry, remains invisible within the Irish American canon on multiple levels. Why would that be the case? Why has he not been kind of reclaimed?
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C
Yeah, so, yeah, so it's a category called Irish American literature. It's customarily excluded even canonical white writers of Ulster Presbyterian origins, such as, you know, people I deal with like Edgar Allan Poe, Ellen Glasgow and Henry James. So Yerby's identification with his Irish heritage in his life and writings cannot be encompassed by conservative definitions of Irishness that insist upon, you know, dermal whiteness on top of, of course, the kind of sectarian narrowness of definition that excludes, you know, Poe and James and Glasgow. I should add one further use of the term Black Irish that I needed to examine and the one that always comes up in questions, funnily enough, is deployment by contemporary white Irish Americans who are generally quite privileged in many cases. And it's used to describe, you know, white Irish coloring, simply very apolitical. And I think that that used to arguably effaces black people of Irish connection in the Caribbean and North America and it even effaces how that that term was used of the marginalized 19th century white Irish in North America. And I should actually backtrack just for a moment because I didn't kind of explain, explain that contention between the post Salmon Irish and the Scots Irish because the more white Anglo Saxon coinage, Scots Irish, it gradually gained currency among that cohort as they assimilated into Anglo America. And it was the influence of, you know, the poor and predominantly Catholic Irish immigrants during and after the famine that strengthened sort of the gulf between the two Irishnesses, the one that was whitened and the newer Irish that aspired to whiteness. So I think as well as encounters with native and African Americans also consider competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between the Ulster Irish and the post Salmon Irish since the inter ethnic conflict of the motherland went with the Irish across the Atlantic. And to get back to what I just said, it also of course inflects the canon of, you know, Irish American literature which seems very, very sectarian in some way.
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B
Sure, sure. So maybe I might have one more kind of definitional question before we proceed. Any Further, drawing on the subtitle of your book, what exactly is this Gothic history that you're studying?
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C
So Irish American literary critics, and I suppose, yeah, Irish critics who look at it as well, they've tended to only consider the social realist literature produced by the post famine Catholic Irish. So this is a very narrow, very partial picture of. So there is a much to discover, I think, about Irish America by reading for the coded present, you know, kind of unprocessed Irish trauma and history and racial anxiety by reading that, particularly a non realist fiction by Irish Americans of all stripes. And so particularly Gothic is very interesting in that regard, since Gothic is a genre about a troubled past that refuses to stay there. So it's kind of a perfect conduit, I think, for thinking about unfinished Irish history.
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B
And then you identify a subgenre that you call Scots Irish Gothic. Can you tell us what that is?
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C
Yeah. So the book suggests that works by Charles Braxton Brown, who, you know, wrote the first Gothic novel in the American tradition, by Brown, by Edgar Allan Poe, by Henry James and by even by William Faulkner, that these express the unease of the ultra settler in America as neither fully normal Anglo Irish Gothic nor fully American Gothic. But I think these works are a subgenre that I termed Scots Irish Gothic. So Poe and James were of ultra settler colonial origin and their ghost stories depict the violence of the old world being ceaselessly reprised in the new. And I think that they, you know, ultimately they're questioning the legitimacy of ultra Protestant presence in colonial Ireland and on the colonial American frontier, or at least an anxiety around that, that history. I think in particular, what I found fascinating was that the Scots Irish, Andrew Jackson, who, you know, emerges as a kind of a scourge of Native Americans in many accounts, he emerges as an undead presence who repeatedly returns in, of course, you know, American political culture down to the Trump administration, but also in Irish American fiction, because both Fitzgerald and James have Jackson hover as a kind of spectral, malevolent presence in some of their fiction.
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B
I mean, this seems to be a theme that runs through a lot of the literature that you're looking at, that I think at one point you suggested history itself is Gothic in Irish American narratives of various genres because of these things that return. Can you tell us more about that?
- [13:43]
C
Yeah. So in their dealings with Native and African Americans, the Irish often replicated the very colonial settler mindset that had caused their flight from Ireland to begin with. And that's depicted in a lot of the fiction. So I consider the baggage of sectarianism and settler colonial violence that was brought by the Irish from the disordered motherland in works by or about their descendants. And so these texts, they often simultaneously conjure up the unfinished history of both Ireland and America. And one of the most interesting examples of this to me was the Irish American dramatist Eugene o', Neill, who is very well read in Irish history. And a play of o' Neill such as Desire under the Elms, I think it simultaneously addresses the seizure of native lands in America by the earliest Irish cohort and the plantation of Ireland. However, you know, only the first have been recognized by critics because I think us American scholars often ignore Irish history in relation to canonical authors of Irish connection, even if the authors of Dows do not ignore our citizens.
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B
And can you tell us more then about the Gothic vocabulary that you're using in the book?
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C
So, yeah, I use a Gothic vocabulary, I think, beyond the genre itself, to describe Irish sectarianism, particularly in relation to the patronymic tradition. So the sort of the male sort of naming down the patrilineal line, that tradition. So the settlement of Ireland by many with British surnames made it a culture that was exquisitely attuned, painfully attuned to the associations of surnames. So surnames that come down the male line are at the root of a kind of an intergenerational haunting in a number of Irish American Gothic texts. So Poe and James both have stories about the return of the dead male ancestor who shares an exact name with his descendants. And I think more broadly, again, the Irish male who carries the patrilineal name is inscribed, you know, by his forebears who demand allegiance to the heritage, to the politics with which the family name is associated. And I use the case of the pro slavery Irish nationalist John Mitchell, who fled to America, of course, him and his New York mayor grandson who had the exact same name, he too was John Mitchell. And I use their case to argue that the Irish male body is itself a kind of an ancestor haunted text. Mayor John Mitchell was at odds at multiple levels with the allegiances and politics of his pro slavery grandfather. The same name, but his famous ancestors outfit reputation among New York Irish nationalists bedeviled the mayor's public life in the World War I era.
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B
So, I mean, Mitchell has this incredibly canonical reputation within Irish nationalism itself. John Mitchell, the original John Mitchell. And then obviously you're looking at and people like Poe and Eugene o', Neill, these incredibly canonical figures, but white male canonical figures. And your book also though, goes beyond this to point out that this Irish American narrative has often been dominated by white males, white Catholic males of the kind like o'. Neill. So how does adding in, let's say female or queer or black as well as Scots Irish writers, performers and public figures change what we think we know about Irish America?
- [17:18]
C
Yeah, okay, great. So I do argue that Jackson, the Jackson and Kennedy eras and administrations, that these consolidated Ulster Irish and post time and Irish whiteness respectively. But I also try to correct for, you know, a traditional over emphasis, I think, on the roles played by such public men in accounts of, you know, Irish whitening. Surveys of Irish American history have sometimes divvied up attention between Scots Irish and post Sam in Irish, but surveys of Irish American fiction have generally ignored Scots Irish writers. I think, nevertheless, you know, both historiography and literary criticism generally kind of have agreed in the past that only straight white male Irish American lives and authors deserve attention in the main. So, you know, try and broaden that. I include writers such as of course James, but also George Kelly, who's Grace Kelly's uncle and a dramatist, or Eudora Welsey, Ella Glasgow and of course Yerby. And I'm trying to correct for literary critics traditional focus on the straight male Catholic Irish American author as the only voice that represents the Irish experience in the Americas. So the book includes writers, performers and public figures of Irish connection who are black and female and queer. And in an attempt to kind of expand this standard Irish assimilation narrative and it's centering of powerful and very, you know, and straight white Catholic Irishmen alone. So, you know, I include people like Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, Mark Mitchell, Faulkner, Josephine Baker, Grace Kelly, John Wayne, Paul Robeson, Maureen o', Hara, Jackie Kennedy and even Mariah Carey makes a quick appearance.
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B
So maybe just to kind of continue then with talking about these canonical writers, tell us a bit about how Eugene o' Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald compare and contrast in terms of how they depict Irishness and race.
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C
Yeah, so one of my chapters doesn't he consider, you know, near contemporaries o' Neill and Fitzgerald. They shared similar backgrounds. You know, both were raised in comfortable Catholic Irish American homes. Both were quite mindful of their immigrant roots in quite different ways. So Fitzgerald over identified with the only non Irish branch of his family because it exemplified Saxon whiteness to him. He was quite anxious about such things. So that emphasis has been unquestioned by critics and it's been, you know, they've left unexamined what I discovered to have been Fitzgerald's 18th century Irish American roots. So this effaced Irishness on his father's side I think he's a great source of the oniz regarding class and racial status that fuels much of Fitzgerald fiction. So by contrast, o' Neill's drama critiques the Irish presence in the Americas over centuries as one long failure to create solidarity with our fellow oppressed, especially peoples of color. So as a result, you know, in oneills drama, unfinished Irish histories haunt the ostensibly American action, you know, and those histories are ranged from the plantation and the famine even to partition, you know. So his work also placed black protagonists, black actors on the Broadway stage in a period when white dramatists did not do this. Indeed, o' Neill actually depicted an interruption interracial marriage between an Irish American woman and an African American man. And that was performed by Paul Robeson, actually. And, and that, that, that through drew threat to o' Neill's family from the kkk. So he did take risks.
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D
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C
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- [21:56]
B
So there are these differences in terms of how they're kind of engaging with their their Irish backgr. Suggest at the same time that for all those differences there is a point of convergence in both of their works where they're engaging what you call a defective Irish whiteness or they're displaying that which you define in both kind of dermal like in skin terms but also in social terms. Can you tell us more about that?
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C
Yeah. So by that I mean so in the Fitzpatrick scale. And Fitzpatrick scale is a classification of skin tone that was created by an Irish American dermatologist of that name. So in that classification, the white Irish had skin tone so light as to be flawed due to being too pale. So, as I've already noticed, a tendency to sunburn, to burn, was a racial liability for a While in the 17th century on Caribbean islands that witnessed indentured white labor and in which the easily sunburned Irish were racialized as Red or Red leg. So this early moment of Irish acclimate African contact is actually evoked in o' Neill's early sea plays, which are set in the Caribbean and which stage very charged encounters between white Irish sailors and black locals. So where Fitzgerald comes into this is that a tendency to burn was also a social liability and fashionable 1920s Riviera beaches in which having an even tan conversely signals whiteness. So these are. There are kind of extraordinarily extraordinary racial implications, I think, to the fact that the trend for suntanning among elite whites was popularized in the Anglophone world by no less than Fitzgerald and his Riviera Circle. Yet Fitzgerald also denigrated himself as half black Irish. So I was trying to hold those two things together. Somebody who makes sun tanning fashionable and somebody who denigrates himself as half black Irish. So, you know, so it's complicated. And so I do end up titling the chapter how the Irish Became Red in an attempt to sort of wrap up with that.
- [24:07]
B
So maybe moving on to one of the other chapters of your book. Chapter four looks at plantation novels by Irish Americans. And I sort of was struck by that because the word plantation pops up on both sides of the Atlantic, but can mean very different things. So can you tell us more about these Irish American plantation novels? What kind of shared characteristics do they have?
- [24:29]
C
Yes. So the chapter focuses on three novels that depict planters of broadly Irish connection in the antebellum and in the post Civil War South. So they are. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and that's Gerald o' Hara is the planter in that. William Faulkner is Absalom Absolum, and A Man Called Footpin is the Irish planter there. And both of Those novels are 36, and the third is Frank Yerby's Foxes of Harrow from 1946, and Stephen Fox is the Irish planter there. And in relation to that, as you say, that interesting repetition, here we go again with the Gothic history and the repetition. I do. The chapter does sort of encompass a comparison of the Irish big house Gothic with the Southern plantation novel, too, and that encompasses Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. But I'm going to Concentrate at the moment on the three Irish planter novels by Yerby, Mitchell and Faulkner. So in them the action is actually fueled by this drive, this Irish drive for whiteness and its achievement through the subjugation of black and native bodies. Of course, the works differ hugely. In Register, Faulkner writes complicated gothic modernism that both mourns and condemns the Old South. And on the other hand, the more accessible historical romances of Yerby and Mitchell portray slavery in very opposed ways. Nevertheless, I think all three of these Irish planter novels, they center on penniless and initially off white protagonists who are a pre famine Irish association and who transformed themselves into the white exploitative landowner class, you know, to whom they themselves had once all been subject. And also the. All three authors were of southern birth in a period of course, in which that region remained racially segregated and all claimed Irish or in Faulkner's case, Scottish Gaelic connection.
- [26:25]
B
And I noticed that in that context you use this other term then, Galo American rather than Irish American.
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C
Yeah, I actually had to coin it. I had to coin a term and I coined Galo American to account for a highland Scottish and Irish affiliation that I found in both Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Just as the kettle term Irish subsumes sometimes mutually antagonistic Irish identities. You know, the term Scottish doesn't always account for the political significance and Irish links of Scottish Highland ancestry as depicted in some of this fiction. So such, I think are central to my reading of Faulkner's Planter Sutman, who is of abject and really multiple poor white British and Irish ancestry in Absalom.
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B
Absalom and obviously Faulkner's An Absalom. Absalom is a quite well known book. Could you tell us a little bit more about Yerby's novel, which is, is, I assume far less well known?
- [27:27]
C
Yeah, that's true. It's not as well known now, but even though he's, he's, you know, his star is on the rise again, there's many critics writing about him, but, you know, that wasn't always the case. He's. So his 1946 novel the Foxes of Harrow was a breakout bestseller and he had actually kickstarted a really prolific career that made America's highest earning novelist for a while. So the Foxes of Harrow covers a 40 year period, 1825-65, which is the height, from the height to the nadir of white Southern fortune. It's a historical romance and it chronicles again one Stephen Fox, who's a poor Dublin immigrant who rises in Louisiana society by acquiring the slave plantation called Harrow. So Foxes was adapted to the big screen act in 1947 in a production starring Maureen O' Hara that I also examined. But the film excised the novel's very central and black characters. So Yerbi's negotiation of his dual African American and Irish heritage is apparent, I think, in Foxes of Harrow, Stephen Fox's so called guttersnipe Dublin origins, they challenge the certainties of the south black, white binary very, very much in the novel, just as many mixed race and racially ambiguous French characters do as well.
- [28:47]
B
Maybe if you can talk a little bit more about this question of writers of Irish heritage or of part Irish heritage. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, was of Irish heritage too, right?
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C
Yeah. They have so much in common. They were both born into. Yerby and Mitchell were both born into part Irish Atlanta families, which is extraordinary. They were both, you know, raised in Georgia during segregation by mothers of Irish descent. However, of course, crucially, their socially assigned racial identities created divergent approaches to representing, you know, the antebellum felt in their respective romance novels. So Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's novel, is set on the Georgia cotton plantation of Irishman Gerald o'. Hara. And it was, and indeed it remains very controversial for opening with a vision of an antebellum Southern, you know, white fairy tale, as the boys called it. And controversially, these very happily enslaved African Americans in Mitchell's novel. So Yerby writes accessible fiction in the Mitchell mode, but he deviates hugely from her novel in depicting rebellious, articulate and very prominen prominent African American characters. And they gradually take over the narrative as the post Civil War period, you know, emerges in the action.
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B
So is Yerby's own background, then why there's so much more interracial, interraciality, if you want to call it that, in his work than in Mitchell's?
- [30:13]
C
Well, yeah, yes, though there is interraciality in Faulkner too. So Sutton, Faulkner's planter in Absalom, Absalom, he is of transportee descent on one side. One of his many ancestries call him a red leg planter. But both, yes, both Faulkner and Yerby mock the ambitions of their Irish planters to secure, you know, legitimate male lines in perpetuity. And they do this by making their heirs illegitimate, mixed race young men by contrast. Then, you know, there's a very sealed white supremacist universe in Margaret Mitchell's vision in Gone with the Wend, in which, you know, black whites or Irish African interracialities, it's kind of impossible in that world.
- [30:55]
B
So I mean, Mitchell's, for want of a better word, like a romance novelist. And Yerby, as you say, is kind of riding in the same mode. So where's the Gothic, then, within these romance, historical romances.
- [31:08]
C
So, yeah, I guess there's a Gothic return of Irish history in Yarby and Mitchen rather than, you know, a Gothic genre, even though Yerby's Prologue is actually quite gothic. But I won't talk about that. I'm going to think about sort of the return of maybe Irish history in some ways. So Ireland's 1798 uprising is not explicitly mentioned in Yarby's novel, but Foxe's age in the action places his birth at about the time of that rebellion. And also, in naming his plantation Harrow, Fox seemingly kind of unironically memorializes the opening class of 1798, which was the Battle of the Harrow. So Jerby's Fox had fled disordered colonial Ireland for America in order to gain what he called, quote, freedom for himself and his sons. And that, of course, is freedom from the kinds of conditions that led to the rebellion in 1798. But of course, Fox achieves freedom for himself and his son by denying it to others. Similarly, in Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gerald o' Hara justifies what he called it, quote, his ruthless, what is called rather, his ruthless singleness of purpose in acquiring plantation and human chattel. I quote the hunger of an Irishman who has been a tenant on the lands of people once had owned. So Yurby has facts begin to regret his choices as he ages. But such introspection never occurs, you know, with Gerald o' Hara in Mitchell's novel, or indeed with his daughter.
- [32:35]
B
Yeah, as you say, like Mitchell's in her work, she has her Catholic Irish planter character kind of unthinkingly replicate Ireland's settler colonial conditions when transplanted to the south, to the American South. How much does this draw on her own background or how much was she drawing on her own background when she wrote?
- [32:56]
C
Yeah, so she had a Tipperary Catholic background, ancestry, and she spent much time at her family's plantation house in her early decades. So these Fitzgerald's Tipperary Catholic ancestors, they had built that. That house, that slave plantation, as it was then, on Georgia land. That Georgia land had been cleared of native presence by no less a person than General Andrew Jackson. And of course, in turn, Jackson went on to secure Scots Irish whiteness by becoming the first of many presidents of that ancestry in the U.S. so altogether, I think my reading of both Mitchell's life and family history side by side, suggest the culpability of the Irish of all stripes in their dealings with peoples of color.
- [33:44]
B
So I might jump forward then quite a bit in time, at least from the settings of these novels, if not from when they were written themselves, both the final chapter and then the epilogue. See, you weave together people that are seemingly connected, like Grace Kelly and the Kennedys, but then ending up with the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in a single narrative of what you call a fairy tale that turns to gothic horror. So tell us how you get from Grace Kelly to Black Lives Matter.
- [34:15]
C
Yeah, yeah, I guess it's this movement from the genre of the fairy tale, the fairy tale of aspirational Irish America at least, which is unconditional whiteness fully achieved, you know, the movement from that to the gothic horror of the sour the dream, you know, with the assassination of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. So the brothers were negotiating civil rights just as their own ethnic cohort attained unconditional whiteness. And I argue that Robert Kennedy in particular maybe was the great what might have been of black and Irish relations in America.
- [34:48]
B
So was it a conscious choice then not to begin with what appears to be a very conventional fairy tale in relation to Grace Kennedy or Grace Kelly and John F. Kennedy?
- [34:59]
C
So I'm going to begin. Yeah, so I should sort of explain where Grace Kelly comes into this. This sort of movement from. From fairy tale, I guess, to Gothic heart. So Kennedy was the first president of Catholic famine Irish descent. You know, he was elected in 1961. And the early 1960s Kennedy era tends to be the beginning point in many assessments of the, you know, the final arrival of the Irish in America to unconditional whiteness. So I think it's not a coincidence that in the Northeast the term Scots Irish receives as a self description from about this point on, since the stigma associated with being Salmon Irish, and recedes at that point, so that all ethnic conflict sort of recedes somewhat, at least in the Northeast at that point. So, however. So I want to backtrack from there, though, because I think that some five years before Kennedy's election, tens of millions of people worldwide watched the ascension of actress Grace Kelly to European royalty and Monaco's Catholic cathedral. And that was in. In 1956. So Kelly, like Kennedy too, was of famine Irish descent. And I argued that the global media event, one of her wedding, that this altered the course of her ethnic cohort. But I think, you know, just to go back to something I said earlier, which is that the sort of the manner in which Kelly's significance to Irish America has never been given scholarly attention. I think that tells us a lot about the master narrative of Irish America. So it was greatest globally broadcast of such two, you know, fairy tale white.
- [36:29]
B
Really?
- [36:29]
C
I call it A White Wedding and multiple registers. So this, this fairy tale is that it paved the way for America's royals as the Kennedy dynasty was named, I think not coincidentally and you know, as well of course, as broader Irish America's assimilation. However, you know, sticking with genre, centuries of Gothic literature hold that, you know, where there is a fair princess in a castle, there is soon to be horror.
- [36:54]
B
So I, I might actually ask you to, to dwell a bit more on that horror, if that's okay. You call it a Kennedy Gothic. So what exactly is this Kennedy Gothic horror that you're describing?
- [37:06]
C
Right, so. So Gothic literature, you know, since its inception really in the 18th century particularly, has expressed the complicity of attaining power and maintaining power. So I look at the gothic cultural afterlives of the new and uncontestably white Catholic Irish power elite in the 19th century, 60s and beyond. So Gothic, you know, it incorporates new aristocracy as they arise. So I term that iteration I identify, which includes the Jackie Kennedy associated documentary Gray Gardens. I call this Kennedy Gothic. And what I mean by that is that cultural and particularly journalistic portrayals of the Kennedys encompass two distinct interpretations that generally break down along party lines. But, but in both iterations, the dynasty is enmeshed with the terror and the violence with which Gothic has always been concerned from its beginnings. So there's kind of two iterations. The liberals and Democrats held that the Kennedy family members were themselves the innocent victims of sinister conspiracies and, you know, a family curse, famously. While for conservatives, and I'm including their Irish American voters abandoning hereditary Democratic party allegiance, while for them, America's royals personified the moral decay at the heart of power. You know, this abiding theme in Gothic, really. So that latter narrative, I think was also entangled with conservative Irish America's often negative response to the Kennedy brothers civil rights agenda.
- [38:41]
B
You've mentioned a few times how your book, in a way, or people like Andrew Jackson in a way, have a tendency to return today in the Trump era or the Trump era that we've just left and we're now living through an era where there's another Irish Catholic American president. Are we in a kind of a Biden Gothic? Would you, would you argue that, or.
- [39:04]
C
Is that a fair reading? I mean, I turned to that somewhat, I think, briefly. Yes. At the end. So, yes, I think Gothic, Biden is only the second Irish president of Catholic famine era Irish descent, you know, extraordinarily enough. But I think the ever growing political chasm among American Catholic means that, you know, the very liberal Biden does not enjoy the support of Catholics on the American right. And where I, I sort of, it's more Feno Tool's phrasing than mine because Fenton o' Toole recently named Biden as post the most gothic figure in American politics and a revenant, the walking dead, effectively, and a revenant from the Kennedy era. So, so yes, you know, if we remember all the Irish surnames, as you sort of imply, you know, in the Trump administration and all the conservative Irish American voices in American media, I think it's apparent that the pact that the Kennedy administration attempted to forge between progressive politics and Irish American Catholicism has indeed come undone. And that's to say nothing of another sort of thread in my book, which is the perceived trouble Trump voter base in areas that would traditionally have been considered strongly Scots Irish. And that was before, you know, the Scots Irish started to be mostly represented as an unethicized white Protestant community. You know, in the post, post Kennedy era, at least in mainstream media.
- [40:27]
B
I mean, there is this kind of sense of possibility that your book and these kind of closing chapters kind of are touching on, like a sense of possibility of the Kennedy era, which comes across in a quote that you use from Robert Kennedy from a speech during his very ill fated 1968 presidential campaign after the death of Martin Luther King. Do you want to end by reading those words?
- [40:59]
C
Yeah, absolutely, I'd love to end on that, I think, because those words remain very relevant, unfortunately. So Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated in April of 1968, while as you mentioned, Robert Kennedy was on, on the, the trail. And his response included these wonderful words, beautiful words, sad words. For there is another kind, a violent, slower, but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions indifferent and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin is different colors. And so two months after he spoke those words memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Kennedy himself was assassinated.
- [41:56]
B
So I think, as all of this has shown, I mean, this is an incredibly multifaceted book touching on so many different aspects of Irish American culture, but also a very broadly redefined sense of Irish American culture. As I said at the start, it's not going to be published until March, but copies can now be pre ordered from Oxford University Press's website for $24. Professor Burke, thanks so much for a really wonderful conversation.
- [42:24]
C
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.