ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Susan Ryan’s debut novel, The King of Lavender Square (2017), in order to show how second-generation Irish negotiate transcultural realities in contemporary Ireland. Drawing on theoretical approaches to the transcultural by Wolfgang Welsch, and more Irish focused theoretical frameworks by Gavan Titley, Gerard Delanty, Michael Cronin and Anne Mulhall, among others, the analysis offered approaches Ryan’s representation of second-generation Irishness with the character of young Patrick Kimba, a black Irish who has to negotiate his transcultural identity as opposed to what has been traditionally regarded as the “Irish/White only”. This chapter proves that Ryan’s novel approaches transcultural Irishness understood as a synergy, an interaction, and an evolutionary process within the social, the political, the cultural and the identitarian macro and micro discourses of contemporary Ireland. Her take on second-generation transcultural Irishness questions the ideology of the Irish nation-state and advocates the reformulation of identity, culture and a new social order through a transcultural prism.
