The Black and Green Atlantic

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In the eighteenth century, parallels were drawn between the enslavement of African Americans and the marginalization of Irish Catholics in Ireland. Belfast newspaper the Northern Star published, William Cowper's "The Negroe's Complaint," and Thomas Day and John Bicknell's "The Dying Negro," manufactured, propagandistic anti-slavery poems in an attempt to draw sympathy for enslaved African Americans and to also suggest that the Irish were metaphorically "slaves" in their own country. The practice of depicting the Irish and African Americans as equivalent or in comparison with each other continued throughout the nineteenth century, even after the end of the American Civil War. An illustration commenting on the travesty of the African American and Irish American vote was published in Harper's Weekly December 1876. Captioned "The Ignorant Vote-Honors Are Easy," by Thomas Nast, the cover is a good visual illustration in regards to how Irish Americans and African Americans were perceived in post-bellum America. By the beginning of the twentieth century, competition for jobs and the steady Irish climb into whiteness distanced Irish Americans and African Americans, but that did not stop black American writers from frequently making a case for Irish "freedom;" highlighting how the Irish struggle for civil rights in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland had been akin to the post-slavery African American quest for civil rights in the United States. And by the mid-twentieth century, African American forms and the African diaspora were influencing on how political activists in Northern Ireland approached the civil rights struggle there. In this course we will explore African American and Irish texts. We will examine how black and Irish artists have gestured towards each other in literature, film, and music. Our goal is to concentrate on how these two cultures have intersected - their shared experiences - while also focusing on important differences between the two cultures. We will examine a broad range of texts, from the eighteenth century to the present, in order to determine the way in which the Irish and African Americans have been racialized. Our ultimate goal is to have a better grasp of the racialization processes in the transnational context.