Reading, speaking and writing liberation

There have been many commercial, cultural, and literary endeavors which have examined connections between African Americans and the Irish. Irish musicians as diverse as De Dannan, U2, and Van Morrison have all voiced their debt to the African-American traditions of gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz. Popular mediums, such as newspaper cartoons and columns, as well as a recent spate of Irish films (The Commitments, The Crying Game , and In the Name of the Father) have characterized the experience of the Irish as colonized subjects, wholly parallel with the experience of disenfranchised African Americans. In a literary context, most examples link the Harlem Renaissance with the Celtic Revival, relying upon instances when James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke and others connected the two. Often, however, such comparisons have been made at the expense of racial and cultural differences.Relying upon Frederick Douglass's affiliation with the Irish, my dissertation works to uphold racial and cultural differences between African Americans and the Irish in order to assert that it is precisely because of their distinctions that both communities have been useful to each other in the articuation of powerful discourses of liberation. I employ a methodology that simultaneously engages the terms of culture, race, gender, and history, and, in so doing, I engage a more precise mode of analysis that acknowledges the importance of interracial and intercultural exchanges, yet does not insist that differing entities be collapsed into one another in order to achieve understanding of their inter-relationship. I contend that the association between African Americans and the Irish is valuable because they have fashioned a formidable language of liberation out of difference. Furthermore, I contribute a new dimension to African-American literary studies which have suggested that the dialectic between the literary and the political springs from a self-contained Black tradition. In my contention that the Irish cannot be discounted when chronicling an African-American ideology of freedom, I lay to rest claims of African-American exceptionalism as well as notions that literature works out of self-contained entities that are separated by stringent national borders