Michael Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics

Faculty Publication

Michael Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics

Ireland and the Caribbean: islands separated by an ocean but not by history.   Michael Malouf’s recently published book, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics, documents shared Irish and Caribbean poetic and political traditions, arising from a common history under British empire and common points of migration to New York and London.

Malouf demonstrates the important, and perhaps surprising, role of Irish nationalism—expressed in the works of Eamon de Valera, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce—in the political and aesthetic self-fashioning of three influential Caribbean figures: Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and Derek Walcott.  The book provides an innovative historical and literary methodology for reading cross-cultural relations between two postcolonial cultures.

Up next for Malouf: a study of the relationship between literary modernism and the emergence of global Englishes—diverse dialects and literary traditions—in the early twentieth century.