Race of angels: The critical reception of second‐generation Irish musicians

Across the margins: Cultural identity and change in the Atlantic archipelago

“…The British music press has conventionally overlooked the particular immigrant background of second-generation Irish musicians (Campbell 1998), whilst simultaneously privileging questions of ethnicity in discussions of musicians of African-Caribbean and South Asian descent. This practice has, however, undergone significant modifications in recent journalistic discourses.…”

“…Instead, what I want to draw attention to is the fact that this Irish dimension has rarely even been acknowledged in scholarly discussions of these musicians and that, in its absence, this work has assuredly posited second-generation Irish musicians as a kind of 'white English' centre with which to differentiate more ostensibly marginal immigrant-descended cultural practitioners. In doing so, this work has not only assumed that the children of Irish Catholic labour migrants are straightforwardly and unambiguously English (when in fact, as has been demonstrated elsewhere, their relationship with the host culture has been complex and ambivalent (Campbell 1999;Ullah 1985)), but it has also overlooked the precarious position that the Irish have historically occupied vis-à-vis whiteness. For instance, Lynda Boose has explained that: [if] 'race' originates as a category that hierarchically privileges a ruling status and makes the Other(s) inferior, then for the English the group that was first to be shunted into this discursive derogation and thereafter invoked as almost a paradigm of inferiority was not the black 'race' -but the Irish 'race '.…”