SOURCE: Piroux, Lorraine. “‘I'm Black an' I'm Proud’: Re-inventing Irishness in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments.” College Literature 25, no. 2 (spring 1998): 45-57.

In the following essay, Piroux discusses the characterizations in The Commitments and investigates the Irish working-class protagonists' similarities to the oppressed African American culture of the 1960s.

In recent years Irish artistic productions in literature and popular culture have challenged contemporary revisionist readings of Irish history by engaging again with the issue of nationalism. Against today's prevailing climate in historical discourse where Ireland's colonial experience is deliberately overlooked, major intellectual and artistic achievements have taken place: founded in 1980, the Field Day publishing, theater, and critical enterprise led by Seamus Deane has focused its attention on the political crisis in Northern Ireland, a conflict viewed as symptomatic of Ireland's unresolved colonial situation.¹ Field Day's playwrights such as Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Tom Paulin have thus made political explorations...