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6 The North American theatre The pioneers North America was the earliest and the greatest theatre of oceanic emigration in which the methods of mass migration were pioneered. The activation of the transatlantic human transfusions was a vast project and many of its origins remain a mystery. But it began as a largely English venture. Mostly, the story of the peopling of America is told as variants on the theme of the dispeopling of old Europe: it is told conventionally as the ‘uprooting’ or the ‘transplanting’ of Europe’s poor and wretched. This fits in well with
4 Touring North America During the second half of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of British performers succumbed to the lure of performing abroad, particularly in the US. This was a marked change from the previous century when, as Travis Bogard explains, ‘No actor would cross the Atlantic and endure the uncertainties and hardships, the censorship, the meagre financial rewards of the eighteenth-century American theatre, if he could have survived in London, or, it must be assumed, anywhere in England’ (Bogard, 1977: 4). More recent scholarship (Anthony
The presence of the Church of England in North America offers an interesting case study of the later Stuart church, where some of the issues and problems encountered by the church in Old England were transplanted to British North America, but also where the radically different religious, political, and socio-cultural contexts across the Atlantic threw up new challenges for the church. This chapter will focus
12 Irish diaspora Catholicism in North America* David Doyle I In their global faiths as in their insular polities, the experiences of the Irish at home entailed a series of unstable ‘identities’ to ease relations with others. This was so despite their obligation of due deference to political authority, regardless of those exercising it. The search for status and prestige imposed choreography of positioning in social life which weakened any consistent outward witness to Catholic values. Impoverished political identities exacerbated this, regardless of their
1 Origins and development The origins and development of the English diaspora in North America The roots of the English diaspora lie in the sixteenth-century quest for an empire, which began processes of territorial settlement, first in the home islands, and then beyond the oceans. Mass plantations in 1580s Munster, for instance, signalled a new and more sustained phase of pacifying Ireland by English population settlement.1 In 1609 this approach was further intensified via systematic, planned, popular migrations as the English joined the Scots of the pre
From the early eighteenth century, a vibrant English associational culture emerged that was, by many measures, ethnic in character. English ethnic organisations spread across North America from east to west, and from north to south, later becoming a truly global phenomenon when reaching Australasia in the later nineteenth century. This books charts the nature, extent and character of these developments. It explores the main activities of English ethnic societies, including their charitable work; collective mutual aid; their national celebration; their expressions of imperial and monarchical devotion; and the extent to which they evinced transnational communication with the homeland and with English immigrants in other territories. The English demonstrated and English people abroad demonstrated and experienced competitive and sometimes conflictual ethnic character, and so the discussion also uncovers aspects of enmity towards an Irish immigrant community, especially in the US, whose increasingly political sense of community brought them into bitter dispute with English immigrants whom they soon outnumbered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the extent of English ethnic associational culture in North America was such that it resonated within England herself, resulting in the formation of a central organization designed to coordinate the promotion of English culture. This was the Royal Society of St George. Ultimately, the book documents that the English expressed their identity through processes of associating, mutualism and self-expression that were, by any measure, both ethnic and diasporic in character. The English Diaspora is based on a very large amount of untapped primary materials from archives in the United States, Canada, and the UK relating to specific locations such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, and London. Thousands of newspaper articles have been trawled. Several long runs of English associational periodicals have been garnered and utilized. Comparative and transnational perspectives beyond the US and Canada are enabled by the discovery of manuscript materials and periodicals relating to the Royal Society of St George.
apparently mainstream commercial present. Tattoos function as symptoms of a psychological and social deviance commodified in the construction of crime as entertainment, but also as signs of a self-confident and empowered youth culture closely linked to tattooing’s subcultural origins. The ostensibly divergent roles of tattooing as atavistic outsider art and emergent fashion become difficult to disentangle. This chapter offers three case studies of the depiction of tattoos in North American TV crime drama in order to interrogate these multiple
Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ErÃn Moure, Junot DÃaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
imagine the refugee, or to recognize distinguishing characteristics of refugeedom (as opposed to immigration). At a time when refugees were making their way across the Atlantic to North America, this visual displacement had a material impact: contributing to restrictions on their acceptance into distant countries. For scholars working with humanitarian imagery or practitioners working with refugees, this look back provides historical perspective to the visual culture of refugees and a corrective to thinking that when ‘out of sight’ means a positive resolution to
The sourcing of cadavers for North American skeletal reference collections occurred immediately after death and targeted the poor and marginalised. In Europe, collections sourced bodies that were buried and unclaimed after some time in cemeteries with no perpetual care mandate, and may have also targeted the underprivileged. The relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and abandonment was examined in a sample of unclaimed remains (603 adults and 98 children) collected from cemeteries in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, that were incorporated in a collection. Results demonstrate that low SES individuals are not more likely to be abandoned nor to be incorporated in the collection than higher SES individuals. Furthermore, historical data indicate that the poorest were not incorporated into the collection, because of burial practices. Although the accumulation of collections in North America was facilitated by structural violence that targeted the poor and marginalised, this phenomenon seems largely absent in the Lisbon collection.