‘A Sly, Mid-Atlantic Appropriation’

This chapter seeks to dislodge Irish America as the dominant referent in discussions of Irish transnationalism and investigate a substantial tradition that positions Spain as an important space in the Irish transnational imagination. The analysis is divided into two sections. The first provides an overview of some of the existing and emerging critical voices relating to Irish transnational fictions. It emphasizes the centrality of Irish America in extant discussions of transnationalism and points to alternative ways of conceptualizing how Ireland’s cultural, historical, economic, and environmental circumstances are enmeshed, literally and imaginatively, with those of other spaces and places. The second part focuses on how Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) might be read in relation to Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936) and Maura Laverty’s No More Than Human (1944) as a work that re-routes the iconic Irish-American transatlantic relationship through a much more capacious cis-Atlantic frame of reference.

‘Sinn Féin permits … in the heels of their shoes’: Cumann na mBan emigrants and transatlantic revolutionary exchange

The emigration of female revolutionary activists has largely eluded historical studies; their global movements transcend dominant national and regional conceptions of the Irish Revolution and challenge established narratives of political exile which are often cast in masculine terms. Drawing on Cumann na mBan nominal rolls and U.S. immigration records, this article investigates the scale of post-Civil War Cumann na mBan emigration and evaluates the geographical origins, timing and push-pull factors that defined their migration. Focusing on the United States in particular, it also measures the impact of the emigration and return migration of female revolutionaries – during the revolutionary period and in its immediate aftermath – on both the republican movement in Ireland and the fractured political landscapes of Irish America. Ultimately, this article argues that the cooperative transatlantic exchange networks of Cumann na mBan, and the consciously gendered revolutionary discourse they assisted in propagating in the diaspora, were integral to supporting the Irish Revolution at home and abroad.