SOURCE: Engle, Anna. “Depictions of the Irish in Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends and Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph.” MELUS 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 151-71.

In the following essay, Engle emphasizes the similar depictions of Irish Americans and African Americans in the novels by Webb and Harper to demonstrate how ethnicity was often conflated with class in nineteenth-century America.

In the 1991 movie The Commitments, Jimmy, the manager of an aspiring Dublin soul band, convinces a band member skeptical of playing African American music that the band's class background makes them black. He argues: “The Irish are the Blacks of Europe. The Dubliners are the Blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the Blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm Black and I'm proud.” In his provocative remark, Jimmy equates low class position with blackness, collapsing class and race. Jimmy draws unusually...