ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes three Irish works from the 1980s that draw on African-American soul and blues music as a way for Irish characters to establish a sense of identity: the novel and fi lm Cal by Bernard MacLaverty (1983, 1984), U2’s 1987 American tour and 1988 tour fi lm Rattle and Hum, and the novel and fi lm The Commitments by Roddy Doyle (1987, 1991). These works explore the possibilities and limitations of revering AfricanAmerican music and blackness as a cure for limited possibilities in Ireland. They suggest that African-American music was an available method of expressing alienation and exclusion and that such availability depended on the ubiquity of American popular culture in Ireland, yet there is little sense that Van Morrison’s history of creative interaction with African-American music had any lasting infl uence. Joe Cleary sums up the social climate of
the period as “conditioned by a major exodus of the country’s young population in search of work in Britain and the United States, by the social toll of constantly rising unemployment and by political deadlock and military confl ict in the North” (19). The late 1980s was a grim economic time in Ireland; high unemployment (more than 20 percent by 1991) drove emigration levels up to numbers not seen since the 1950s (Cleary 18). In the Republic, the successful 1983 referendum in support of a constitutional ban on abortion and the 1986 referendum defeating an effort to legalize divorce was a lesson to young people about the power of an entrenched Catholic conservatism. And in Northern Ireland, the aftermath of the tragic 1981 hunger strikes was stifl ing stalemate. Luke Gibbons calls it “the twilight of an era of sustained underdevelopment that had blighted successive attempts at modernization since the founding of the state” (“‘The Global Cure?’ . . .” 94). MacLaverty, U2, and Doyle’s identifi cations with blackness respond to this environment by trying to imagine identities outside it. But ultimately these identifi cations are more about limitation and failure rather than the optimism and possibility of O’Connell, the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association (NICRA), or even Van Morrison.
