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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Michael Doorley. Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935. Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press. 2005. Pp. 223. $55.00.
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| Despite its rise to prominence at a dramatic juncture in Irish American history, the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) is typically overshadowed by the Fenians and Clan na Gael within the turbulent Home Rule era of the later nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Nonetheless, the organization occupied a distinct niche within early twentieth-century Irish American political culture. The political upheavals shifting Ireland out of colonial dependency and into Free State sovereignty also influenced the development of modern Irish American identity, and the FOIF merits attention as a key contributor to the process. Although the road to Ireland's independence has been heavily trafficked by historians, Michael Doorley's transatlantic perspective presents new vantage points. His study of the FOIF as the public face of "diaspora nationalism" bridges national boundaries at a crucial point in the course of modern Ireland and the evolution of modern Irish America. |
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A product of political currents earlier mobilized within Fenianism and Clan na Gael and subsequently fed by several other organizations invested in the constitutional-nationalist agenda, the FOIF reflected the variegated nature of Irish American nationalism by the 1910s. Mindful of Tone-like republicanism, O'Connellite influence, and Young Ireland radicalism, the organization shepherded a broadly configured political legacy through the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising. Invoking the Fenian spirit—if not its methods—and Mitchel-inspired dynamism, Doorley argues that the FOIF foundation in the year of rebellion marked a new phase in Irish American activism. Famine-era trauma and "a hostile American environment" (p. 13) yielded a compelling platform from which to mine both recent past and ancestral heritage to cultivate an organization worthy of representing twenty million Irish Americans. |
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