This chapter considers the impact of what Mark McGurl has called ‘the Program Era’ on recent Irish fiction. It tracks the emergence of a new kind of Irish novel moving back and forth across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States. Taking Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mary Costello’s Academy Street as examples, the chapter proposes that these works indicate the gravitational force of American cultural and economic supremacy in ‘the Program Era’ as the United States has drawn Irish writing into its orbit. However, even as the Irish Transatlantic novel attests to some convergences of Irish and American realities, the form also hints at an autumn or early winter of American global hegemony.

New York City had a significant role in Richard Wright’s search for political and artistic freedom. During the ten years he spent there, the emerging writer reached the pinnacle of his career amid the city’s magazines, newspapers, publishers, and cultural brokers. Wright utilized various professionalizing networks, including the CPUSA and WPA, and he published Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son shortly after his arrival in 1937. Additionally, he radicalized the short-lived New Challenge, exposed Harlem’s poverty in the Daily Worker, and fictionalized his research on black domestic workers and juvenile delinquency in “Black Hope” and Rite of Passage, respectively. Wright’s years in New York were his career’s most productive, and this success was reflected in his personal life, which included settling into marriage and fatherhood as well as the 7 Middagh artistic community. Although New York fostered these interracial domestic relationships, its boroughs were not free from the Jim Crowism African Americans lived under elsewhere. The prejudices Wright encountered in Brooklyn and Manhattan, on top of those he had experienced in the South, influenced his decision to leave the U.S., as he believed the move to Paris would free him to write with new perspective on American race relations.

This chapter examines the print culture that emerged from successes in black entrepreneurship in early nineteenth-century Brooklyn, New York. Through a close analysis of a newspaper notice, a city directory advertisement, and a patent, the author considers how three free Black men determined their own modes of political, economic, and cultural self-expression in spite of their oppression. Moreover, the chapter situates their economic protests into a larger contextual struggle. In the antebellum decades, Brooklynites, like many other early free Black communities across the North, pursued a variety of ways to secure their humanity. In Brooklyn, residents built their communities by establishing schools, churches, mutual aid societies, and businesses. Their activism resulted in vibrant and mobilized communities in areas known today as downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and Weeksville, New York (the second largest free Black community in pre-Civil War America).

In January 2018, Jason REVOK William’s lawyer sent to H&M, the Swedish clothing company, a cease-and-desist letter. 1 By writing to the brand’s representatives, the lawyer was lamenting the unauthorized use of one of REVOK’s iconic pieces in H&M’s recent ad-campaign. In the photoshoot, a graffiti that REVOK illegally painted on a wall of a handball court in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, appeared as a backdrop. The LA based artist requested H&M to stop sharing the photoshoot on social media and demanded compensation. H&M rejected REVOK’s requests and refused to settle. In a surprising turn of event, the company filed a lawsuit against the artist claiming that the illegal nature of his work excludes it from copyright protection. 2 After public backlash, H&M withdrew the lawsuit and settled the dispute out of court.