Race, Politics, and Irish America

Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History is a cultural and literary history tracing how Irish immigrants and their descendants navigated, and were transformed by, the racial politics of the United States. Mary M. Burke follows this history from the forced transportation of Irish convicts and indentured servants, through eighteenth-century Ulster-Scots Presbyterian migration, to the mass arrivals following the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Burke examines how Irish America moved from a marginalized, often racialized position toward the racial and political power of "whiteness," using figures ranging from Scots-Irish president Andrew Jackson to Caribbean-Irish pop star Rihanna as touchstones. Literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse all serve as evidence in her argument.

Central to the book is Burke's use of Gothic literature — proposing distinct "Scots-Irish Gothic" and "Kennedy Gothic" strands in the work of writers including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty — to read the anxiety and complicity that came with Irish America's gradual absorption into whiteness.