Blackness in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Blackness in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Race, Affect, Representation analyses the representation of black characters in the novels of Colum McCann, Sebastian Barry, and Oona Frawley, and in the short stories of Roddy Doyle, Melatu-Uche Okorie, and Kit de Waal. This book argues that affect is an agent for the construction of racial difference, revealing or masking processes of racialisation of Irishness through whiteness and the anti-black construction of Irish society. This compelling study merges Irish Studies, Affective Theory, and Black Radical Thought, considering the figuration of affects from the levels of narration (racial anxiety), the character-reader relationship (humanistic affects), and the specific emotions within the literary text (guilt, anxiety, hope, paranoia, abjection, antagonism). Blackness in Contemporary Irish Fiction work is the first comprehensive study in Irish Studies to examine the specificities of the representation of blackness in Irish fiction.