Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation

Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation brings together chapters which revisit and reconsider diverse modes of (mis)representing, performing, articulating, witnessing, constructing, and deconstructing ‘Irishness’ from a twenty-first-century vantage. The time is ripe for such an inquiry. The Celtic Tiger and Brexit, the Marriage Equality referendum and the #Repealthe8th and #WakingTheFeminists campaigns compel us to turn to history and representation (in literature, drama, art, music, film, television, non-fiction, popular, and digital culture) to reassess how ‘Irishness’ has been shaped and reshaped through parochial, national, and international performances and gazes as a variously class-coded, gendered, sexual, religious, national, and artistic identity. This focus on the cultural, societal, historical, and political interfaces between performance, performativity, spectatorship, and identity in diverse Irish and international contexts reveals tensions between self-image and Othering, innovation and cliché, cultural production and negotiated reception.