Marion R. Casey

New York University Press, 2024. 322 pages.

ISBN: 978-1479817450 (Hardcover)

To those interested in Irish American history, the broad narrative of Marion R. Case’s The Green Space is a familiar one: in the period spanning from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Irish people in the US were transformed from the racialised targets of the “Know Nothing” nativist movement to being effectively assimilated into, and celebrated as part of, normative American whiteness. Structurally, the book presumes a degree of familiarity with this transition, as the chapters are arranged around themes, not periods, and Casey jumps back and forth in time with some frequency. What is novel is that Casey examines these social, political, cultural, and economic developments through the lens of image-making. The Green Space is not a history of Irish or Irish American cultures, rather it is a history of how Irishness has been imagined on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. If nations are imagined communities (Anderson 2003), then charting the history of that imagining is vital work.

That imagining, Casey argues, has occurred within what she dubs “the green space” where “borrowing from math and science, we must recognise a binary system to which Ireland and the United States contribute codes that, together, form a matrix” (2024: 1). The concept of the green space expresses the give and take at play in constructions of Irishness in the US and Ireland, highlighting how cultural exchange between Ireland and the Irish diaspora does not flow solely in one direction. Rather, the cultures of Ireland and the Irish diaspora feed off – or into – each other, creating what Casey calls “a transatlantic feedback loop that progressively grew stronger over the course of the twentieth century” (2024: 189). In her view, existing scholarship treats Ireland as the true repository of authentic Irishness and Americans as ignorant and sentimental, obscuring centuries of cultural cross-fertilisation. While Casey’s willingness to treat diasporic Irishness as legitimate and Irishness as having long been intercultural is welcome, the other side of the green space’s coin is startlingly absent. The US emerged as a superpower after the Second World War, but how the US’s global cultural, political and economic hegemony shaped the green space in this period, and how this impacted on Irish images in Ireland, is undifferentiated. The only effect of American images of Irishness on the Irish people “back home” in this period discussed at length is the selling of American conceptions of Irishness back to Americans. Combined with her critique of Ireland as the “magnetic north” (2024: 2) of Irishness, the reader might mistake Ireland for the hegemonic power, wielding its social and political power to force Americans to listen to the Clancy Brothers instead of Bing Crosby (2024: 2).

While Casey frames The Green Space as a transatlantic history, The Green Space is a better and more rewarding experience when understood as an Irish American history. When cataloguing Irish American images, Casey makes especial use of ephemera like postcards, commercial sheet music and print advertisements, jumping effortlessly from Tin Pan Alley songs to lawsuits on which car dealership had the right to bill itself the “Smiling Irishman”. Her analysis of Irish exhibitions – official or unofficial – at various World’s Fairs captures the complex interplay of interests involved in presenting something as Irish. For Ireland, it represented the country’s economic welfare, its legitimacy as a nation, and displacing centuries of negative stereotyping. For Irish America, it represented social mobility, ethnic integration, and respect in a society that viewed them with suspicion. Ireland largely appears through American eyes in the book. Major events and figures from Irish history – the 1916 Rising, for example, or Éamon de Valera (whose own Americanness goes unmentioned) – are explained to a degree that assumes reader unfamiliarity. The Famine is mentioned once; Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, and industrial schools not at all.

It is perfectly fine to write a history of Irish America in which events on the island of Ireland make for a relatively minor entry. It does, however, add to a sense of The Green Space as lopsided. The book would be greatly enriched by a comparative analysis that clarifies Casey’s arguments about Irish American images. As a work of American history, the experience of Irish America’s Italian, Jewish or German counterparts in the same period would be illuminating. If focusing solely on the Irish diaspora, then the total non-acknowledgement of Irish diaspora cultures outside of the US – notably those of Britain, Australia, Canada, or Argentina – seems like a great oversight. If the green space is an opportunity to conceptualise Irishness as a process of cross-fertilisation, then the Irish communities of Glasgow, Liverpool, Melbourne or Newfoundland have surely fed into that exchange, too. While including these comparisons in any detail would change the nature of Casey’s project significantly, they would sharpen the existing material, making it even more resonant.

The book’s greatest weakness is its attempts, or lack thereof, to analyse cultural texts which are mentioned, instead focusing on the historical context and cultural reception. This is probably the correct approach when dealing with novelty trinkets and promotional gimmicks, but it feels lacking when covering substantial works of theatre or film. Casey presents Irish American objections to the Abbey Theatre’s 1911 touring production of JM Synge’s masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, as eminently reasonable given the history of stage Irish caricature in American theatre and Playboy presenting its story of a man bragging of killing his father as “an image of the Irish that purported to be ‘soberly documentary’ […] a contemporary drama, set in a supposedly realistic depiction of rural Ireland” (2024: 70). But Playboy of the Western World is not sober, documentarian, or realistic. It is an outrageous comedy. Later, Casey attributes the brazen falsity of Robert Flaherty’s 1934 documentary Man of Aran – with its ruggedly premodern shark hunters – to the popularity of Synge, since both implicate the west of Ireland as the embodiment of a truer and more authentic Irishness, regardless of how disparate their imaginings of that truer Irishness may be.

Contrasting her justification of Man of Aran, Casey denigrates the Irishness of The Informer (1935), directed by John Ford (the American son of two Irish immigrants) and adapted from a novel by Liam O’Flaherty. Although the film is set in Dublin during the War of Independence, Casey notes that it was “filmed in Los Angeles” and takes at face value RKO’s claim that it “could just as easily be set ‘in the colonies of Pennsylvania, in the grim salt mines of Siberia,’ as in Ireland” (2024: 202). This strikes me, quite obviously, as the studio trying to downplay the potent political content of The Informer during a publicity campaign. The Informer is about betraying an organised resistance movement against the state – so it translates to Black militants in Cleveland, as in Uptight (1968), but it is far from infinitely mutable. Casey is less immediately dismissive of The Quiet Man – the light to The Informer’s dark – although her examples of Ford “deploy[ing] the green space” (2024: 208) consist largely of his working with his regular company of actors, notably Barry Fitzgerald, who she frames primarily through his work at the Abbey Theatre. Despite The Green Space being a book about Irish image-making, this is the only mention of one of Ireland’s most notable screen actors. Maureen O’Hara is also mentioned only once, and not in the context of her screen persona. Maureen O’Sullivan is not mentioned at all. Casey is a historian, not a theatre or film critic, but some textual analysis may have enriched her historical account – allowing The Green Space to speak about, not merely through, these films.