Of Irish Descent
Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics
of Belonging

Cloth $29.95s    |    978-0-8156-3159-0    |    2008

Examining tensions between ideas of plurality and commonality, difference and connection that run through the culture and science of ancestral origins, Of Irish Descent is an original and timely exploration of new configurations of nation and diaspora as communities of shared descent.

Reviews
"A thoughtful, comprehensive essay that examines the theoretical connections and empirical disjunctions within the Irish diaspora. Her discussion of the existing literature on diasporas, historical memory, and other such heady matters combines a comprehensive scope with clear prose—a combination that is both rare and laudable."
—Choice

"[This book] is based on the premise that the fluid and disparate materials that make up the genealogical project—identity, place, longing, memory, text, and imagination—constitute a web of relatedness that are imbricated into networks of power and politics. Genealogy is revealed as a vital cultural geography. The book is a fluent and often brilliant interrogation of this project."
—Denis Linehan, Cultural Geographies

Description
What does it mean to be of Irish descent? What does Irish descent stand for in Ireland? In Northern Ireland? In the United States? How are the categories of "native" and "settler" and accounts of ethnic origin being refigured through popular genealogy and population genetics?

Of Irish Descent addresses these questions by exploring the contemporary significance of ideas of ancestral roots, origins, and connections. Moving from the intimacy of family stories and reunions to disputed state policies on noble titles and new scientific accounts and applications of genetic research, Nash traces the place of ancestry in these interconnected geographies of identity-familial, ethnic, national, and diasporic. Underlying these different practices and narratives are potent and profoundly political questions: "Who counts as Irish?," "Who belongs in Ireland?" and "To whom does Ireland belong?"

Examining tensions between ideas of plurality and commonality, difference and connection that run through the culture and science of ancestral origins, Of Irish Descent is an original and timely exploration of new configurations of nation and diaspora as communities of shared descent.

View other books on Irish Studies

Author
Catherine Nash is professor of geography at Queen Mary, University of London. She has written numerous articles in the fields of feminist cultural geography, geographies of relatedness, and Irish studies.

6 x 9, 376 pages, 10 illustrations, notes, bibliography, index