ABSTRACT
When Roddy Doyle’s youthful, irreverent, insightfully class-conscious novel The Commitments was published in the United States in 1988, it felt like a new but familiar voice in Irish literature. It was perhaps the fi rst Irish novel I read in which I felt such strong cultural affi nities between the United States and Ireland. This is of course because of the soul music The Commitments play. The music plot of the novel-the band casts off playing post-New Wave music in favor of soul-was a revelation. Doyle manages to simultaneously reawaken the tenacious and complex analogy between the Irish and African Americans and render it slightly absurd. If a reader has ever seen a nineteenth-century Thomas Nast or Punch cartoon depicting the Irish or Irish immigrants as apes, or remembers the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association singing “We Shall Overcome” at marches and protests in the late 1960s, The Commitments was somehow both the same old song and a brand new thing.
