The Irish and the Imagination of Race

"This book analyzes the role of Irishness in the nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Centering the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, it asks how the seemingly liberationist politics of many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers could fail to comprehend the ethical necessity of opposing both race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underwrote and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers O'Malley focuses on drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering as support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet, in doing so, they frequently fell into what he identifies as a failure of translation, a misrepresentation of the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy"--