ABSTRACT
Christmas Eve 1861 found John Joseph Hughes well away from any place he had ever called home. In a gilded palace near the Arc de Triomphe, he urged the emperor and empress of France to help his country. Paul Gilroy has defined the “Black Atlantic” crossing—from Africa to America and, in the case of intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, back again—“as an intercultural and transnational formation” that defies nationalist paradigms for cultural history because of its “inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas”. Irish American “whiteness” is the subject of a remarkable proliferation of scholarship in the 1990s. A seminal example is How the Irish Became White, in which historian Noel Ignatiev argues that nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to America gained access to the benefits of whiteness over time. Such works make important contributions to understanding both of the history of racialization processes at work in the United States and of the roles the Irish played in those processes.
