Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England

Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England
Author: Barry Hazley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526128020

What role does memory play in migrants’ adaption to the emotional challenges of migration? How are migrant selfhoods remade in relation to changing cultural myths? This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion, and the Troubles in England, chapters shed new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances that formed them, as well as the cultural and personal dynamics of subjective change over the life course. At the core of the book lie the processes by which migrants ‘recompose’ the self as part of ongoing efforts to adapt to the transition between cultures and places. Life history and the Irish migrant experience offers a fresh perspective on the significance of England’s largest post-war migrant group for current debates on identity and difference in contemporary Britain. Integrating historical, cultural and psychological perspectives in an innovative way, it will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography.

The Irish in Post-War Britain

The Irish in Post-War Britain
Author: Enda Delaney
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2007-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191534889

Exploring the neglected history of Britain's largest migrant population, this is a major new study of the Irish in Britain after 1945. The Irish in Post-War Britain reconstructs, with both empathy and imagination, the histories of the lost generation who left independent Ireland in huge numbers to settle in Britain from the 1940s until the 1960s. Drawing on a wide range of previously neglected materials, Enda Delaney illustrates the complex process of negotiation and renegotiation that was involved in adapting and adjusting to life in Britain. Less visible than other newcomers, it is widely assumed that the Irish assimilated with relative ease shortly after arrival. The Irish in Post-war Britain challenges this view, and shows that the Irish often perceived themselves to be outsiders, located on the margins of their adopted home. Many contemporaries frequently lumped the Irish together as all being essentially the same, but Delaney argues that the experiences of Britain's Irish population after the Second World War were much more diverse than previously assumed, and shaped by social class, geography, and gender, as well as nationality. The book's original approach demonstrates that any understanding of a migrant group must take account of both elements of the society that they had left, as well as the social landscape of their new country. Proximity ensured that even though these people had left Ireland, home as an imagined sense of place was never far away in the minds of those who had settled in Britain.

Lovers and Strangers

Lovers and Strangers
Author: Clair Wills
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2017-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141974966

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian 'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review 'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence. Lovers and Strangers is an extremely important book, one that is full of enjoyable surprises, giving a voice to a generation who had to deal with the reality of life surrounded by 'white strangers' in their new country.

The Irish in Victorian Britain

The Irish in Victorian Britain
Author: Roger Swift
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book illustrates the diversity of the Irish experience by reference to studies of specific towns and regions which have hitherto received little attention from historians of the Irish in Britain during the Victorian period.

London Irish Fictions

London Irish Fictions
Author: Tony Murray
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846318319

Examines the specific role that the metropolis plays in literary portrayals of Irish migrant experience as an arena for the performance of Irishness, as a catalyst in the transformations of Irishness and as an intrinsic component of second generation Irish identities.

The Best Are Leaving

The Best Are Leaving
Author: Clair Wills
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107048400

Clair Wills's The Best Are Leaving is a study of representations of Irish emigrant culture and of Irish immigrants in Britain.

Irish Migrants in Modern Wales

Irish Migrants in Modern Wales
Author: Paul O'Leary
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780853238584

A collection of essays, the contributors to this volume describe the experiences of Irish migrants who moved to Wales. The essays also examine in depth the social and cultural impact the Irish immigrants made on the country.

An Immigration History of Britain

An Immigration History of Britain
Author: Panikos Panayi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2014-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317864220

Immigration, ethnicity, multiculturalism and racism have become part of daily discourse in Britain in recent decades – yet, far from being new, these phenomena have characterised British life since the 19th century. While the numbers of immigrants increased after the Second World War, groups such as the Irish, Germans and East European Jews have been arriving, settling and impacting on British society from the Victorian period onwards. In this comprehensive and fascinating account, Panikos Panayi examines immigration as an ongoing process in which ethnic communities evolve as individuals choose whether to retain their ethnic identities and customs or to integrate and assimilate into wider British norms. Consequently, he tackles the contradictions in the history of immigration over the past two centuries: migration versus government control; migrant poverty versus social mobility; ethnic identity versus increasing Anglicisation; and, above all, racism versus multiculturalism. Providing an important historical context to contemporary debates, and taking into account the complexity and variety of individual experiences over time, this book demonstrates that no simple approach or theory can summarise the migrant experience in Britain.

Gendering Migration

Gendering Migration
Author: Wendy Webster
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351934333

Gendering Migration demonstrates the significance of studying migration through the lens of gender and ethnicity and the contribution this perspective makes to migration histories. Through a consideration of the impact of migration on men and masculine identities as well as women and feminine identities, it extends our understanding of questions of gender and migration, focusing on the history of migration to Britain after the Second World War. The volume draws on oral narratives as well as documentary and archival research to demonstrate the important role played by gender and ethnicity, both in ideas and images of migrants and in migrants' own experiences. The contributors consider a range of migrant and refugee groups who came to Britain in the twentieth century: Caribbean, East-African Asian, German, Greek, Irish, Kurdish, Pakistani, Polish and Spanish. The fresh interpretations offered here make this an important new book for scholars and students of migration, ethnicity, gender and modern British history.

Demography, State and Society

Demography, State and Society
Author: Enda Delaney
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773522138

The process of migration is associated with longing, homesickness, the shock of exposure to a new culture, and, sometimes, escape and freedom. Between the foundation of the new Irish state in 1921-22 and the early 1970s approximately one and one-half mill