Eccentric Nation

Eccentric Nation examines four performance events in nineteenth-century New York City in which Irish cultural nationalism was constructed and reinforced by musicians, actors, playwrights, speakers, parades, and athletes, and disseminated among diverse crowds that included both Irish and Anglo-Americans. Their contemporaries and more recent analysts alike have often taken these performance conventions as representations of a common Irish voice or a monolithic national identity. Close examination reveals a much more conflicted Irish community. What appeared as shared symbolism was contested among both Irish and Anglo-Americans. Masculine nationalist heroes, visions of a romanticized peasant class, evocations of collective memories, and the repetition of performance traditions all served to reinforce the idea of a single community bound together. Those symbols often gave rise to diverse meanings that were circulated in the urban populace. Each chapter examines the staging of these four events that produced dissension in the Irish community, providing insight into the ways that a nation is imagined in different ways by a broad array of people who have a stake in its existence, even if they often disagree about its core identity.