Overview
- Awarded the James S. Donnelly Prize for Best Book in History and Social Science at the American Conference for Irish Studies 2017
- Draws on multi-language archival sources to show the efforts of Irish nationalists to remake themselves
- Shows how these efforts attempted to counter colonial notions of English superiority and Irish inferiority
Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in History (GSX)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It analyses how both national movements sought to refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes and create more prideful (and highly gendered) images of their respective nations. Drawing on English-, Irish-, and Hebrew-language archival sources, Aidan Beatty traces how male Irish nationalists sought to remake themselves as a proudly Gaelic-speaking race, rooted both in their national past as well as in the spaces and agricultural soil of Ireland. On the one hand, this was an attempt to refute contemporary British colonial notions that they were somehow a racially inferior or uncomfortably hybridised people. But this is also presented in the light of the general history of European nationalism; nationalist movements across Europe often crafted romanticised images of the nation’s past and Irish nationalism was thus simultaneously European and postcolonial. It is this that makes Irish nationalism similar to Zionism, a movement that sought to create a more idealized image of the Jewish past that would disprove contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Reviews
“This volume will find appreciative readers not only within Irish and Zionist studies, but in fields more broadly concerned with questions of nationalism and gender. For those concerned with the practical value of work on history, this book's publication is all the more important when one considers not only the centenary of the Irish revolutionary period, butmore significantly, the rise of sexist nationalism around the globe.” (Charles Clements, breac.nd.edu, October, 2017)
“This comparative analysis of Irish nationalism and Zionism has a compelling narrative drive. In its treatment of territory, language and state ethos, an interpretative audacity on questions of gender is chastened only by sound scholarly scruple and a tremendous archival rigour. The work is done on that difficult but challenging borderland between cultural and historical studies. It will prompt many exponents of colonial and postcolonial theory to review many of their assumptions.” (Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation)
“Beatty provides an innovative analysis of masculinized nationalism in Ireland. By unpacking key Irish case studies he demonstrates how the circulation of “muscular” ideals constructed a “proper” political manhood in Ireland. His approach—which includes a thoughtful comparison with Zionism—serves as a model for future historical studies of manhood and nation.” (Sikata Banerjee, author of Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Aidan Beatty is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies and Scholar-in-Residence at the School of Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884-1938
Authors: Aidan Beatty
Series Title: Genders and Sexualities in History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44101-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-68416-8Published: 08 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-44101-0Published: 23 September 2016
Series ISSN: 2730-9479
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9487
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 266
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 3 illustrations in colour
Topics: Modern History, History of Britain and Ireland, Gender and Sexuality