Men ready to exercise self-rule

Aidan Beatty is the author of "Masculinity

and Power in Irish Nationalism."

Page Turner / Edited by Peter McDermott

In a recent essay in the Irish Echo, Aidan Beatty referred to the fact that Yitzhak Shamir, while on the run as a member of LEHI, a right-wing Zionist group fighting the British in Palestine in the 1940s, adopted the pseudonym Michael in homage to Michael Collins. Marxist Zionists, at the other end of the political spectrum, rejected the Irish model of liberation, pointing out an obvious difference: the Irish were “a people on its land,” whereas most Jews still lived in the Diaspora, and Palestine had a predominantly Arab population.

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Nonetheless, the parallels that Shamir, a prime minister of Israel in the 1980s, saw were real, and Beatty’s first book focuses on one of them in particular.

“‘Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism,’” he said, “is a comparative history of race and gender in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It examines how both national movements emerged on the fringes of Europe and how both sought to disprove various stereotypes about Irish or Jewish masculinity as part of their national projects.

“Both movements created idealized images of Irish or Jewish men to prove that they were ready to exercise national self-rule,” Beatty said.

Aidan Beatty

Place of birth: Galway

Residence: Detroit and Galway

Published works: “Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism” (Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Education: BA from Trinity College Dublin (2009), MA (2011) and PhD (2015) from the University of Chicago, Postdoctoral Researcher at Concordia University in Montreal (2015-16).

What is your writing routine? Are there ideal conditions?

I wrote four of the six chapters of this book whilst living in a camper van on a farm in rural Michigan. I’m pretty easy going, as long as it’s quiet.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

I wouldn’t think I’m in a position to give advice to anyone and I’ve always had a bit of a suspicion of people who seem to be too eager to give you advice. But possibly contradicting that, and just based on my own experiences, don’t be afraid that the first thing you write will be terrible – most of the work is done in editing and re-writing. So just write and write and write, and worry about the end results later.

Name three books that are memorable in terms of your reading pleasure. Is there a book you wish you had written? What book changed your life?

I don’t think I could pick just one, or even just three. George Mosse, a German-Jewish refugee from the Nazis, who went on to write a series of books about respectability, nationalism and sexuality, had a major impact on me. I really like people like Perry Anderson or Robin Blackburn who came out of the New Left in Britain and have produced wonderful works of intellectual history. In Irish history, I really like Richard Dunphy’s book about Fianna Fáil, “The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland” and Angela Bourke’s “The Burning of Bridget Cleary.” Gail Bederman’s “Manliness and Civilization,” a book about race and gender in 19th and 20th century American politics, is the kind of book I aspired to write when I was writing my first book; I like any writer who can discuss complex ideas in a sophisticated and complex way whilst still being generally accessible in their prose.

What book are you currently reading?

“The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” by C. Vann Woodward and “A Life Beyond Boundaries,” the posthumously published memoirs of Benedict Anderson.

If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be?

Right now, I’m doing a lot of research on Edmund Burke, the 18th century politician and philosopher. It might be interesting to meet him but it’s hard not to suspect that he would be snobbish and obnoxious.

You're Irish if...

I really like the looseness of what the greatest ever Irish Jew once said, “a nation is the same people living in the same place… or also living in different places.” I’m wary of any clear definitions of ethnicity. Obviously, lots of Americans claim Irish ancestry, and those claims have a lot of meaning for them. But being Irish also has a lot of meaning for Irish citizens whose ancestry comes from other countries. If you can define Irishness, then you’ve drawn borders around it and some people will be left outside those borders; I think we should have a healthy distrust of borders.

 

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