White Cottage, White House examines how Classical Hollywood cinema developed and deployed Irish American masculinities to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in midcentury America. Largely confined to discriminatory stereotypes during the silent era, Irish American male characters emerge as a favored identity with the introduction of sound, positioned in a variety of roles as mediators between the marginal and mainstream. The book argues that such characters function to express hegemonic whiteness as ethnicity, a socio-racial framing that kept immigrant origins and normative American values in productive tension. It traces key Irish American male types—the gangster, the priest, the cop, the sports hero, and the returning immigrant—who navigated these tensions in maintenance of an ethnic whiteness that was nonetheless "at home" in America, transforming from James Cagney's "public enemy" to John Wayne's "quiet man" in the process. Whether as figures of Depression-era social disruption, avatars of presidential patriarchy and national manhood, or allegories of postwar white flight and the nuclear family, Irish American masculinities occupied a distinctive and unrivaled visibility and role in popular American film.
This book focuses on the intersection between the assimilation of the Irish into American life and the emergence of an American popular culture, which took place at the same historical moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, the Irish in America underwent a period of radical change. Initially existing as a marginalized, urban-dwelling, immigrant community largely comprised of survivors of the Great Famine and those escaping its aftermath, Irish Americans became an increasingly assimilated group with new social, political, economic, and cultural opportunities open to them. Within just a few generations, Irish-American life transformed so significantly that grandchildren hardly recognized the world in which their grandparents had lived. This pivotal period of transformation for Irish Americans was heavily shaped and influenced by emerging popular culture, and in turn, the Irish-American experience helped shape the foundations of American popular culture in such a way that the effects are still noticeable today. Dowd investigates the primary segments of early American popular culture—circuses, stage shows, professional sports, pulp fiction, celebrity culture, and comic strips—and uncovers the entanglements these segments had with the development of Irish-American identity.
Here, Shannon guides readers through a number of classic films from the 1930s and a T40s and investigates why films featuring Irish American characters were so popular among American audiences during a period when the Irish were still stereotyped and scorned for their religion.
From Levi and Cohen, Irish Comedians (1903) to The Irishman (2019), this book is a fascinating journey through the history of representations of the Irish in American cinema.
Screening Irish-America is a major work in Irish-American screen studies. Sourced largely from papers delivered at the conference of the same name at University College Dublin and Boston College in the US in 2007, the book contains contributions by leading scholars in the field. Essays range from early and silent cinema through to recent television shows such as Scrubs. Topics include John Ford, the Irish-American gangster, Irish-American stars and the representation of the Scots-Irish and religion. Drawing on theories of ethnicity, gender, class and diaspora studies, this is the first publication in this academic area.
This study explores the relationship of an ethnic group of vital importance in America's history--the Irish--and a preeminently American art form and business--the movies. Curran maintains that movies reflected and influenced their viewers' perceptions of the Irish and that both the movies and the Irish who made them facilitated the assimilation of the Irish ethnic group into American society. The initial chapter traces the history of Irish immigration to America, concentrating on the experiences of Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Irish-American involvement in the movie industry dates from its beginnings in the Nickelodeon Era at the turn of the twentieth century. From that time until their replacement by sound movies around 1930, silent films helped to popularize the Irish ethnic group while simultaneously transmitting assimilationist values to its members and other ethnic minorities. Three chapters are devoted to the 1930-1960 period--Hollywood's heyday when American motion pictures attained technical maturity and enjoyed their greatest popular influence. During this period the Irish made their biggest gains both in the movies and the nation, as screen personae such as the Irish priest, antihero, and Irish All-American entered popular culture. James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, John Ford, Gene Kelly, and Grace Kelly are just a few of the Irish-American movie greats discussed. Irish success in the movies facilitated and mirrored their rise in America and helped to transform them from outsiders to a no-longer readily distinguishable ethnic minority. The culmination of this transformation and integration was the election of the first Irish Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. A final chapter discusses the post-1960 era. The volume is illustrated with stills from some of America's most popular and memorable movies, including such favorites and prototypically Irish films as Angels with Dirty Faces, Going My Way, The Fighting 69th, The Informer, The Quiet Man, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and On the Waterfront, among others. As well as having great nostalgic appeal for readers interested in the Irish or movies, Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen is an excellent text for courses in Irish Studies and American Ethnic or Film History.