The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.

The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

Americanist literary criticism has long emphasized the “new” as moments of rupture with traditional modes of interpretation. From New Historicism to the New Americanists, this introduction takes stock of some of these developments over the last twenty years, providing at once an overview and ideas about new directions that the field of nineteenth-century Americanist literary criticism might take in the future. In particular, it highlights the importance of critical modes that focus on bodies and sexualities, move away from the nation-state, adjust the scales of analysis, and reconsider aesthetics.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Dinah Craik’s 1851 novella The Half-Caste tells the story of how a half-Indian heiress, Zillah Le Poer, faces manipulative attempts by the greedy British side of her family to control her fortune which she thwarts by marrying her older Scottish guardian. This reading of Craik’s novel examines the production of race at a period when dominant British imperialism was believed to depend largely on hierarchies of race allegedly constructed by heredity. Walters argues that Craik describes how new racial identities can be produced by the ‘affective capacity of brown, Eurasian, female bodies to feel connection with – and dependence on white women’, with resulting implications for racial hierarchies and Empire itself. The chapter examines the idea of race in part as a function of feeling and reveals a ‘slippage between affective and racially scientific methods of assessing difference’.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

While schema theory motivated the original measures of automatic cognitive associations between constructs in memory, researchers soon modified these to explore a different domain: implicit attitudes about social groups that elude standard self-reports. As the so-called implicit attitude revolution gained steam, the original measurement goal got much less attention, especially in political science. We believe the schema concept – automatic cognitive associations between features of an attitude object – continues to hold great value for political psychology. We offer a retrofit of the popular implicit association test (IAT), one more efficient than many lexical tasks, to tap these associations in surveys. The new technique captures the degree to which citizens link ideas about ostensibly group-neutral policies to specific social categories. We use this measurement strategy to explore the psychological mechanisms underlying group centrism in politics, an effort that has been largely abandoned due to measurement difficulties. Results from four studies offer practical suggestions about the application of implicit measures for capturing the automatic ways people link groups to important political objects. We conclude by discussing the broader promise of implicit measurement of group schemas, not just implicit affect, for political psychology.

Chapter 7 explores how the logic of UN mediation as an art produces masculinities, particularly the subjects of ‘the mediator’, ‘conflict parties’, and ‘youths’. The first part examines the narrative representations of ‘the mediator’ as a political man who should show good judgement, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be spatially mobile. ‘The mediator’ has to be empathetic and good at listening – feminised traits that operate as capital for male mediators, but less so for women. In addition, the selection process for mediators draws from the masculinised professions of diplomacy and politics and the informal, male-dominated networks of diplomats at the UN. This chapter presents descriptive findings on the gender and career backgrounds of senior UN mediators. The second part of the chapter examines representations of local men. ‘Local men’ – often equivalent to the ‘conflict parties’ – function as the constitutive outside of ‘the mediator’. ‘Conflict parties’ are represented as emotional, traditional, and irrational, recalling colonial constructions of the ‘other’. Meanwhile, male ‘youths’ appear not as political agents, but as vectors of senseless violence. Thus, a colonial hierarchy of masculinities exists in which local men are subordinate to the mediator.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.

This chapter focuses on historian Charles Sellers’ argument that by the mid-nineteenth century, many white southerners, influenced by the spirit of American democracy and the values of evangelical Christianity, could never fully embrace the proslavery argument and maintained only a half-hearted commitment to the region’s peculiar institution based on economic necessity and racial fear. Sellers argued that most white southerners experienced moral unease if not full-fledged guilt over how to justify living in a slaveholding society. In Sellers’ view, this “travail of slavery” burdened white southerners throughout the late antebellum period and even beyond emancipation. Subsequent scholarship initially supported Sellers’ argument that white southerners experienced varying measures of guilt over slavery. But during the 1970s, an array of new scholarly studies revealed that most white southerners eagerly defended slavery as a necessary institution and accepted the racial justification for slavery and thus retained a deep commitment to white supremacy.