Neither with you or against you: Irish cultural representation of America after September 11

Abstract

Irish public sphere discourse about the United States has, particularly since the September 11 attacks, been regularly reproached for being 'anti-American'. This paper explores the cultural politics of this charge by creatively juxtaposing the analysis of an Irish current affairs programme with a Hollywood made 'Irish' movie. The value of our analysis, we argue, is that, taken together, both objects enable us to problematize the politics of the other, thus providing us with a more complex context for exploring the overdetermined question of political-cultural (dis) identification. We interrogate the ideological simplicity of the discourse structuring the anti-American charge, while at the same time showing how Irish news media representations enable such a discourse to be articulated. We also explore a more generous mode of Irish cultural identification through a reading of Jim Sheridan's 2003 movie In America, though we simultaneously problematize the assumption the movie can be read as a straightforward 'homage' to America. We conclude by cautioning against reified modes of analysis that project a fullness onto political-cultural identities that are always formally open, and over-privilege the national as an object of culture. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.