This Book Review - or a version of it - will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies.
REVIEW
McCarthy, A.
(2011). Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840. Manchester
University Press, 240p.
We take into our hands a new
book by Angela McCarthy, aware that there is already a body of work in place. Amongst my favourites, amongst the published
articles, is the 2001, ‘ ”A good idea of colonial life": personal letters
and Irish migration to New Zealand’, which firmly laid ground rules. New Zealand was going to study its migrants’
letters, and was going to contribute to our better understanding – and better
use – of the Emigrant Letter elsewhere.
As for books, my favourite is the 2005 Irish migrants in New Zealand,
1840-1937: 'the desired haven', which should be better known to scholars of
the Irish Emigrant Letter. That book explores
its letter collections using the ground rules – again, ground rules – of David
Fitzpatrick. And it bravely shapes its
Thematic Index alongside that of Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation. Since I am especially interested in how
knowledge is created and shaped, the Diaspora Studies geek in me always enjoys
Angela McCarthy’s literature reviews.
In tandem with such studies
of Irish settlement in New Zealand there has appeared a sequence of articles
studying Scottish settlement and letters, and a book which combined
perceptions, the 2007 Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration,
1921-65:'For Spirit and Adventure'.
I should pedantically make the point that it is now easily possible to
track the influence of all these works using online resources like Google
Scholar and JSTOR – and if we are going to theorise about ‘the Irish’ and the
Emigrant Letter, New Zealand will not be ignored.
We are therefore looking at
scholarship about, cumulatively, two emigrant groups, the Scots and the Irish,
and scholarship which often studies them in a comparative manner. Since most statements about ‘the Irish’ are
disguised comparisons, this approach is valuable. And this approach is rare – partly for almost
geo-political reasons, and here I would include the politics of academic
careers. Communities themselves are
interested in difference – to track the real life effects of prejudice, or as a
way of shaping a distinctive identity, or as part of generation control
systems. This new book by Angela
McCarthy is about identities, Scottishness and Irishness. It is thus an exploration of repertoires of
identity, which – I have pointed out elsewhere – mostly coalesce around leisure
activities.
There are obvious dangers,
for the writer and for the reader. The
specialist reader is inclined to read with most attention the material about one
specific group, and I must confess that that is what I did, at a first reading
of Scottishness and Irishness. This
is, sort of, fair. We see how the writer
handles the material with which we are most familiar. There are dangers with cumulative material
about ‘Irishness’ - literature reviews can, over time, develop into a kind of
shorthand. Detail is lost, time and
place, research discipline and methodology.
An inter-disciplinary approach must be critical. Here, for example, Stivers (p17), is a study
of alcohol use in the USA and American stereotypes – it is not a study of ‘the
Irish’.
A second, closer reading,
truer to author’s intentions, took on the themed chapters, the matched Scottish
and Irish detail – each chapter shaped by a knot in the research material and in
background theory. This sent me back to
the literature on Scottish identity – see above, online resources – so that I
could begin a better dialogue with the book.
There is no doubt that, at times, the book can be a bit programmatic –
but after a while I found this to be a strength rather than a weakness. The geek in me sees this book as the
literature review, writ large. And I am
struck, as I read the material about the Scottish identity alongside the Irish,
not by difference, but how similar the two groups are. Both groups move from one little archipelago
in the northern hemisphere to another little archipelago in the south – and,
for the most part, entirely within the structures, economic, control,
patronage, of the British Empire and its successor organisations.
It is always possible to find
a difference, of course – but is it, to coin a phrase, a difference that makes
a difference? One difference that
McCarthy does highlight is that whilst Irish societies in New Zealand frequently
articulated political aims, Scottish societies were predominantly cultural (p
142). In our own time, when there is a
restored and active Scottish Parliament – and, soon, a referendum on Scottish
independence – this certainly makes us pause.
We are certainly looking at matched control systems here. And the detail of the ways in which the Scots
of New Zealand ‘forged’ – to use Linda Colley’s word – a cultural identity are revealing. Look, for example, at the Scottish use of
Robert Burns (p140) – there is no matching Irish use of Thomas Moore. In another part of my working life, the study
of song, I look at Burns and Moore as models for nineteenth century
lyricists. When it comes to repertoires
of identity some bits of the possible repertoire simply work better than
others. In the new country, in the new
communities, selection processes take place.
Yes there will be discussion of authenticity, but there will also be a
willingness to invent tradition, as the need arises.
Another way into McCarthy’s
material is to explore gaps and absences.
If we were to indulge a typical focus group study of Irish identity, discussion
of violence would loom large – particularly a willingness to use violence for
political ends. This is how we were seen
in the world, and still are, to a certain extent. Lee and Casey (2006), the standard work on ‘Making
the Irish American’ – ‘making’, not ‘forging’ – must pause to give Kevin Kenny
a chapter to explore that very issue. And this makes discussion with our colleagues
in the Armenian or the Basque Diaspora so… productive. There is very little about this part of the
repertoire in McCarthy’s book, but the author is, of course, aware of debates –
there is discussion of the 1988 movie, The Grasscutter, a standard
thriller in which a violent secret organisation intrudes into the idyll. But in that case the secret organisation is
Irish Protestant and loyalist. Mostly we
see the Irish and the Scots behaving like a standard subaltern group within the
British Empire – if anything McCarthy’ selected quotations give an impression
of Irish unwillingness to engage in violence.
So, a book that makes us work
hard, and makes us think – especially when we place it alongside wider study of
diaspora. For this we give thanks.
Patrick O’Sullivan
2013
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