Abstract
The Irish Diaspora is like Ireland’s version of North Sea Oil. But different in that for many interest groups, the value of this extensive human resource of 70 million people might never run dry. In Of Irish Descent, Catherine Nash provides a ground-breaking critique of the Irish genealogy industry and the political cultures, in Ireland and abroad, that pump value from the deep wells of Irish identity. Her 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. Nash begins with a discussion on the relatively recent ‘discovery’ of the Irish Diaspora. If Irish emigration in the past had been a source of national shame, it has now has been monetized to become a vision of cosmopolitanism as well as Ireland’s entrée into global networks of economic opportunity. Nash describes the volatility of this network, held together by a diverse array of genealogical projects, some personal, some public, some scientific. She challenges the consensual national imaginaries of collective identity that often frames what has come to be known nostalgically as the ‘Irish Empire’. In contrast, she pursues the idea that Irishness transcends national boundaries and collective identity and is lived, remade and constructed differently in a variety of situations and geographies. The result is a text that constantly and productively moves against the grain.
An absorbing chapter on Gaelic nobility and the truth claims to ancient chiefdoms and their regulation by the Irish Genealogical office reveals the vexed record of belonging, drenched in post-colonial politics and riddled with paradoxes and contradictions. Probably the most powerful chapter in the book is on Ulster. Here Nash underlines how questions of ancestry and historical origins are entangled with the politics of identity and belonging that radiate on a daily basis into the present. Compared to the fantasy, fraud and posturing of faux Gaelic Chiefs, Nash gets to the heart of the consequences of origin story. In Northern Ireland, in a society that lives its present through the performance of its past – notably in political murals and marches - the past she shows becomes more than an imaginative possession.
The final two chapters are concerned with genetics, their arrival into the genealogical cookbook, and the predictable entanglement of the science of DNA with the politics of identity. In this analysis, Nash - guided by a wider project concerned with the popular understandings of science and a well-placed feminist critique - concludes that while ‘conventional genealogy can uncover the complexities of family histories and identities, geneticised genealogy usually offers reductive and over simplified accounts of ancestry.’ She observes that, far from enhancing or resolving the search of roots, the outcome is deeply patriarchal, privileging as it does the significance of the male-line.
At the centre of Nash’s concerns is an exploration of the search for roots and how origin stories are made and experienced as they are variously shaped by historical events, intense identity politics and diverse modes of circulation and representation, scientific and otherwise. At same time as being about Ireland – or, more particularly, ideas of Irishness as they are expressed in the USA, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland - the book is also a geographical essay on the unsteady qualities of belonging and its constant reinvention. The book presents perspectives that potentially have a rich resonance with other diasporic experiences. Additionally, Nash deploys many of the conceptual artefacts devised in relational geography, many of which she has innovated. The book is insightful and subtle when addressing relatedness and contingency, and the often social and emotional consequences of thinking across time and space to make the connection to an origin story.
In all, Of Irish Descent presents a sweeping analysis that weaves together personal narrative, interview material, literary analysis and scientific critique. For contemporary cultural geographers, this text is undoubtedly a model of how challenging and how extraordinary it is to make this kind of geography. Of Irish Descent is a powerful essay on identity, a masterwork from one of the most accomplished geographers working in human geography today.