‘We Are Where We Are’

Arguing that return emigration and the figure of the returnee have proven central to discourses of Irish economic recovery, the coda puts Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) in conversation with Kate Kerrigan’s Ellis Island (2009), situating both historical novels emphatically within the moment of their composition rather than those periods during which they are set (1950s and 1920s). It contends that they must be read in the context of wider Irish discourses of self-analysis that accompanied the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy, discourses which troubled the historical construction of the Irish/U.S. transatlantic relationship in oppositional terms by suggesting that boom-time Ireland had, in fact, become the U.S. Emphasising both novels’ interest in forms of feminine self-fashioning, labour and enterprise that are evocative of the ways in which the Celtic Tiger was, itself, constructed as feminine, the coda argues that the novels deploy the motifs of emigration and return in order to explore and, to varying degrees, critique the neoliberal economic model celebrated during the boom years.

Erin’s Acres

This chapter considers the extent to which the Returned Yank surfaces in narratives treating of land acquisition, distribution, ownership and development in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies two overlapping motifs in Returned Yank narratives that have been stated, restated and reworked in various historically-contingent ways from at least the 1930s, through the Lemassian turn, through the Celtic Tiger years: first, the extent to which the Returned Yank who returns to Ireland to buy property symbolises widespread ambivalence concerning the role of the post-independence Land Commission in Irish life; second, the degree to which narratives of land-purchasing (or ‘land-grabbing’) Returned Yanks become abstracted in the 1960s and beyond to the extent that s/he (usually he) comes to symbolise U.S. investment in Ireland more generally.

‘Mother Macree ad nauseam’

This chapter argues that narratives of female Returned Yanks emerge forcefully in Irish culture of the 1990s as a kind of imaginative counterpart to Irish citizens’ enforced confrontation with Ireland’s past at the same historical moment, particularly with respect to the collusion of Church and State in the oppression and, often, abuse of women and children. The protagonists of these texts – and I focus most attentively on works by Benjamin Black (John Banville) and Annie Murphy – literally return to Ireland, but they also visit, or revisit, upon Ireland some of the repressions of its past. They do so both thematically, by dramatising the issues of unmarried motherhood, forced adoption and Church intervention in the family; and formally, by revising previous and tenacious gendered mythologies of emigration and return.

‘Quiet Men’

This chapter examines fictional Returned Yanks – notably in Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men (1980), Benedict Kiely’s Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985) and Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic (2010) – who become involved in and/or comment on the Northern Irish ‘Troubles.’ This conflict, through its resurgence in the late 1960s, challenged optimistic and prematurely celebratory attitudes towards Irish modernisation that claimed that nationalism and ‘atavistic’ ideological attachments would disappear through the modernisation process. However, an understanding of nationalism that sees insurgency as antithetical to modernity is fallacious for, as Benedict Anderson argued so influentially in Imagined Communities (1983), nationalism is a product of modernity. Many Troubles narratives feature Irish Americans whose parents or grandparents were involved in the nationalist struggle in the 1920s and who retain a recalcitrant commitment to the ideal of a united Ireland. In narratives of the Troubles, then, the Returned Yank is a kind of revenant or ghost from a past which the southern state – whose authority was profoundly undermined in the 1970s and 1980s by Northern republican challenges to its legitimacy – wishes to disavow.

‘The Secret Dotted Line’

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this chapter discusses narratives in which a thematic preoccupation with return also underwrites metafictional concerns with literary forebears, the Irish literary tradition and artistic exile. Exploring texts that span 1960 to 2008 and the work of prolific, exiled writers Brian Moore (1921-1999) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) as well as the much younger writer Denis Kehoe (b. 1978), this chapter configures ‘return’ in multiple senses: the literal returns of fictional characters to Ireland; return as ‘restoration’ (of occluded histories; of banned books); and return as an opportunity to engage with (literary) genealogies that do not conform to the gendered and heteronormative orthodoxies of the Irish literary tradition.

‘The Meanest Form of Animal’? The Returned Yank in the Cultural Imagination

The introduction maps out the key assertion of the book: that the Returned Yank surfaces repeatedly and most memorably when questions regarding ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are particularly vexed. Emphasising the rhetorical significance of the figure of the returned migrant in debates about Irish economic recovery since 2008, the introduction surveys both the creative landscape inhabited by the Returned Yank since the late nineteenth century. Acknowledging that cultural representations of the figure long predate the stated parameters of the book (1952 to present), the introduction goes on to demonstrate to extent to which a series of socio-political, demographic, scholarly, cultural, business-oriented and touristic interests and efforts collided and intersected in Ireland of the 1950s, ensuring that the issues of migration and return – and, most especially, the figure of the Returned Yank – became imprinted on the public consciousness in ways not previously witnessed.