Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 Performing hyphenates: a study in contemporary Irish-American identity and cultural performance Patrick Michael Bynane Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bynane, Patrick Michael, "Performing hyphenates: a study in contemporary Irish-American identity and cultural performance" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2813. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2813 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. PERFORMING HYPHENATES: A STUDY IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH-AMERICAN IDENTITY AND CULTURAL PERFORMANCE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Theatre by Patrick Michael Bynane B.A., Ashland University, 1993 M.A., Southwest Missouri State University, 1995 December 2002 ©Copyright 2002 Patrick Michael Bynane All rights reserved ii For my mother and father, in honor of all their support. And for James McCoy, my great-uncle, without whom my understanding of Irish-America would have been so much the poorer. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The number of people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude would take the length of another complete dissertation. Those few mentioned here are simply the ones who haven’t escaped my exhausted mind. Dr. Les Wade’s guidance and mentorship have been invaluable, not only for this project but for my entire period of study at LSU. Dr. Bill Harbin, also, has provided me with assistance and advice much needed and much heeded. Dr. Jenny Jones came to LSU late in my career at the university but her influence has been as great and helpful as anyone I have studied under. Dr. Femi Euba, Dr. Michael Bowman, and Dr. Ruth Laurion Bowman all have shared their leadership and wisdom when both were much needed. I would also like to give a special thank you to the Celtic Society of Louisiana for opening their organization to me. On a more personal note, the friendships I have developed during the time of my study have been, in many ways, the most valuable and important of my life. Dr. Paula Thompson, Dr. Bob Bradley, and Dr. Mike McIlheney all have offered me support and insight during my most cynical moments. Matt Altman, Kurt Heinlein, Marc Sherill, Alex Harrington, Gino Chelakis, Steven Berwin, Mark Zylinski, Don Whitaker, Wendell Stone, David Charles, Tony Medlin, Mike Wilks and Amy Cuomo have kept me sane and grounded through it all. Without them I would have sunk years ago. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Sedevie family. David, Donna iv and Alex have become a family away from family for me. Thanksgiving would have been a bleak holiday indeed without them. Finally, I have to thank Sarah Taylor. Her love and understanding makes me a better person. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication. .iii Acknowledgments. .iv Abstract. .vii Introduction. .1 A Survey of the Theories. 32 A Brief History of Irish-American Culture. .61 The St. Patrick’s Day Parade Has No King: St. Patrick’s Day Parades in New Orleans and the Construction of Irish-American Identities. 111 Two Irishmen Walk into a Bar…: Flanagan’s Wake and the Improvised Performance of Identity . .147 Speaking into Being: The Ancient Irish Oral Tradition and Its Legacy in Irish-American Cultural Performance. 177 Riverdance: Irish Porno. 208 Conclusion. .236 Works Consulted . .259 Vita. .266 vi ABSTRACT This study examines the issues and contradictions of identity formation found in contemporary Irish-American cultural performances. Using a theoretical language grounded in post- structuralism and cultural studies, this examination hopes to demonstrate the primacy of performance and theatre in the formation of culture, Irish-American specifically, or otherwise. The performances featured in the study are: Riverdance, St. Patrick’s Day parades, pub performances, and improv theatre. vii INTRODUCTION At a Decatur Street intersection on St. Patrick’s Day, 2000, the Downtown Irish Club of New Orleans decided to stop their parade and dance. The parade itself is not a closely patrolled affair and the street barricades that are so ubiquitous during Mardi Gras are notably absent. In this intersection the marchers were handing out beads, flowers and other “throws.” Dressed in their white tuxedo shirts, emerald ties and cummerbunds, black tuxedo pants, green, white and orange sashes and black bowlers the parade members looked like the very model of St. Patrick’s Day parade participants. The marchers invited the observers to join them in the intersection and dance to the music being played from the back of a float that had accompanied them along their cross-city march. The parade-goers gladly complied, and to the strains of Kid Rock’s “I Want To Be A Cowboy,” everybody danced. Middle aged men, twenty-something college students, blacks, whites, young and old, all danced in the middle of this intersection, while the rest of crowd smiled, laughed, and looked on with amusement. This moment embodies a notable change in the ever-shifting game of Irish-American identity politics. We see the failure of the traditional binary structure of Irish-American identity to fully explain the performance on Decatur Street. Simply, no model hoping to prove authenticity or purity of culture would have room for such a playful and multi-dimensional moment as 1 this. To the strains of a song written and performed by a white man from Detroit, rapping in a style created and developed by African-American youth in Brooklyn in the late 1970’s, singing lyrics that employ the mytho-poetic street slang of pimp culture as well as the equally mythic language of the Wild West, a large group of individuals danced their own unique dances in a French Quarter street, inviting all those present to join them in their celebration of “Irishness.” The joyous Celtic carnival ignores the existence of the militaristic marches of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians (AOH) so prevalent in the Northern United States. The collected crowd could be forgiven for easily forgetting the exclusionary tactics of the New York and Boston parades as well as the racial tensions that sometimes exist between Irish-Americans and the city’s other ethnic identities. Replacing these historic legacies was a sense of limitless self-invention ready to be negotiated and re- engineered on the next street corner. And yet the latent racism and bigotry of the nation’s AOH organizations still exist in a very real way; the New York and Boston parades are still the most obvious examples of Irish-American identity in the United States today, and one could easily question the self-awareness of the parade participants and observers in the continually metamorphosing game of identity creation. A new model that accounts and allows for the flexible interplay between cultures and acknowledges the constructed-ness 2 of identity is required in order to “make sense” of Irish-American moments such as that described above. A brief moment experienced in the French Quarter on St. Patrick’s Day hardly makes for a “paradigm shift.” However, this kind of cross-cultural free-play appears to be occurring on many different levels and in many different places. Such activity obviously has its positive and negative consequences. A conception of Irish-American identity that can account for and negotiate the interplay and the resulting affects must be developed. This dissertation will present an argument demonstrating the problematic issues involved in employing a monologic and binary reading of Irish-American culture. Furthermore, this study will argue that an understanding of Irish-American culture grounded in the dialogistic and pluralistic theories of Joseph Roach, Homi Bhabha, Greil Marcus, Richard Schechner, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton provides a more efficacious method of interpreting hyphenated cultures. Following such a methodology inherently complicates the already complex area of identity formation and representation. That, however, is the point. Until recently most histories and analyses of Irish-American culture utilized a polarizing model in formulating an understanding of Irish- American culture. In such a model, Irish-American culture must always be considered in opposition/relation to Ireland as a singular “source” culture. By allowing the complications of the 3 hyphenated identity to exist messily alongside each other, this study hopes to create a more porous, flexible and accurate rendering of Irish-American culture. Contemporary Irish Studies texts and journals rely heavily upon a conception of Irish-American identity and culture as an experience still grounded in 19th century narratives. Such an intellectual tactic only reinforces the monologic and essentialist history making and identity formation that this study attempts to address. One recent and telling example of the tone and methodology employed by Irish Studies scholars should help explain more fully the dynamic that dominates much of the writing on Irish-American history. The Spring/Summer 2002 edition of the Irish American Cultural Institute’s journal Eire-Ireland dedicated all of its material to Irish-American issues since 1900. This special edition (called such by the editors) featured ten articles by scholars from Ireland, Canada and the United States. Of the ten articles, no less then three dealt with the memory of the 1843- 1853 Famine and only two articles even attempted to wrestle with Irish-American history or culture as it has existed in the past thirty years.