Chapter 5 - Blackface Minstrelsy, Irish Modernism, and the Histories of Irish Whiteness

Summary

This essay examines the role of blackface in white Irish culture, especially around the time of the emergence of independent Irish statehood in the first half of the twentieth century, as a critical context for contemporary practices and ideas of whiteness in Ireland. This examination takes three forms: the first is a speculative history (and it can be no more) of blackface minstrel theater in Ireland; the second is an analysis of representations of blackface acts in Irish modernism (specifically in works by James Joyce and Jack B. Yeats); and the final section offers a brief consideration of the longer and perhaps ultimately more troubling manifestations of blackface in Irish folk culture.