Abstract
When W. E. B. DuBois proposed in 1903 that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” he made a slight but important mistake.1 Rather than being riven by a single color line, the new century would prove to be fractured by multiple lines: some of race, some of color, some using criteria other than color. All retroactively hued their objects of categorization in order to naturalize racial formation inside the United States and out. The story of the Irish in America comprises an important chapter in the larger narrative of how those disparate lines of color and race interacted.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Press, 1968), 3.
Within whiteness studies, the Irish have repeatedly been cited as a group through which to understand how various European immigrant groups have passed from a quasi-racialized status into whiteness. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1996);
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999);
Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997);
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). While several scholars have analyzed O’Neill as an Irish writer, with the exception of Joel Pfister none have considered the racial significance of Irishness in the early twentieth century. Pfister, however, considers the Irish as constituting a class of immigrants in the United States who experienced tremendous discrimination on that basis, but neglects the positioning of the Irish within systems of racial classification.
For an excellent essay that analyzes the whiteness of Irishness in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, see David R. Roediger, “White Looks: Hairy Apes, True Stories, and Limbaugh’s Laughs,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 53.
John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
James A. Robertson, Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 4.
At the premiere of Desire Under the Elms, O’Neill complained, “the Freudian brethren and sistern seem quite set up about Desire and, after reading quite astonishing complexes between the lines of my simplicities, claim it for their own. Well, so some of them did with The Emperor Jones. They are hard to shake!” Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 577.
Christopher Lane, “Introduction,” The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6.
Adam Phillips, “Keeping it Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler’s ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’,” in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 152.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), 243–58; 250.
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 6, emphasis added.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, emphasis added.
Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, in Modern Drama: Plays, Criticism, Theory, ed. W. B. Worthen (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995), 304.
Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 25.
William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 35.
Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 132.
Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater 1935–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148.
DuBois, “Back to Africa,” in John Henrik, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa, quoted in Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Richard Brucher, “O’Neill, Othello and Robeson.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 18: 1 (1994): 45–58; 53.
For a discussion of O’Neill’s simultaneous respect and contempt for his father’s love of his Irish roots, see Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 78.
In his 1918–20 notebook, O’Neill wrote of “the idea for a drama of reincarnation contrasting the oldest civilization of china and that of modern times — same crises offering definite choice of either material (that is worldly) success or a step toward higher spiritual order.” Virginia Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 58.
James A. Robertson, Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 2.
Eugene O’Neill, Marco Millions, in Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill (New York: The Modern Library, 1954).
Moy argues, “while the materialistic West is shown to be ‘unromantic’ O’Neill’s Eastern detached ‘wisdom’ proves impotent in the face of the Western desire for money and power. […] O’Neill created what initially appears to be a privileged Imaginary Orient beyond the margins of the West. But, this too is finally dismissed by its dominant practitioners in the play, Kublai and Kukachin.” James S. Moy, “Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions: Desiring Marginality and the Dematerialization of the Orient,” in Eugene O’Neill in China: An International Centenary Celebration, ed. Haiping Liu and Lowell Swortzell (New York: Greenwood Press: 1992), 33.
David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John: Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 31.
Eugene O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks,” in O’Neill and his Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargile, N. Brillion Fagan, William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 305.
Copyright information
© 2010 Shannon Steen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Steen, S. (2010). Melancholy Bodies: Eugene O’Neill, Imperial Critique, and Irish Assimilation. In: Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297401_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297401_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58741-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29740-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)