Web Resource: Transnational Urbanism in the Americas
January 27, 2010 § Leave a comment
This just came through on the H-Urban listserv. Cambridge University Press has launched a multimedia companion, Transnational Urbanism in the Americas, a companion to a special issue of the journal, Urban History. This is from CUP:
In this special issue, a project of the journal’s North American Editorial Board, six authors from Canada, France, and the United States explore a sweeping range of historical issues that linked cities of the Americas to the rest of the globe. They write: “The emerging transnational paradigm suggests intriguing new possibilities for the historical study of cities. Transnationalism challenges us to map out the patterns of human life in neways as they cross and construct cities, nations, and other crucial formations. Even as this new paradigm stimulates a fundamental rethinking of urban historical scholarship, the Internet and the World Wide Web are also challenging our received modes of scholarly communication.
This multimedia companion meets these challenges through a hybrid of cartographic, narrative, and photographic presentation, featuring the publishing debut of HyperCities, an online, open-source research and educational platform for studying and interacting with layered hypermedia histories of city and global spaces.
Access to the on-line companion is free. Subscribers get access to the journal itself.
The Irish Are Not, and Were Not, British
January 23, 2010 § 3 Comments
There are very few things in academia that get my goat quite like statements such as the following: “In all, there were 2,544,101 British born living in foreign counties [in 1861]. Most of these were accounted for by emigrants to the United States [,] 2,476,132 (of whom 65% were Irish and 4.5% were Scots).” (my italics)
The Irish don’t belong in this categorisation. Ireland isn’t part of Britain. Nor was it ever. The island itself, of course, is part of the British Isles, but that is not what people refer to when referring to “Britain.” Britain is the other major island, on which the nations of England, Scotland, and Wales can be found. In 1801, an Act of Union was forced upon the Irish following the failed United Irishmen uprising of 1798. But the kingdom created out of this union was known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Today, the UK is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
This annoys me for two reasons: 1) I am an historian of the Irish diaspora and, I also include myself in that diaspora, and 2) it is just historically, definitionally, and factually wrong. Prior to Irish independence in 1922, it is true that people born in Ireland received UK (more colloquially referred to as British) citizenship. But so did Canadians, prior to the creation of Canadian citizenship on 1 January 1947. It is also true that one can claim UK citizenship based upon ancestral UK citizenship of someone (i.e.: a grandparent) born in pre-independence Ireland. But that doesn’t make the Irish British, either historically or today. It made the Irish citizens of the UK, just as someone who is from Northern Ireland is today a UK citizen (although, due to the Repbublic of Ireland’s citizenship laws, some Northern Irish/UK citizens can also claim Irish citizenship).
The point is that the relationship between Ireland and Britain (or perhaps more properly termed, England) is complicated. But it’s just laziness that causes academics to lump the Irish in with the British in discussing emigration.
When writing my dissertation, my supervisor and I had an argument about some random fact of the Irish past (I was right, it turned out), but he made a good point: as an academic and a scholar, you don’t want to make little stupid errors, because they sap your credibility. He was bang on. I see stupid errors, even typos, and I find myself questioning the credibility of the source. I read historically, definitionally, technically, and factually incorrect statements in peer-reviewed scholarship, and I find myself dismissing the larger argument being made. Call me fickle, call me a stickler. Factual correctness matters.
Bring on the Brand New Renaissance
November 17, 2009 § Leave a comment
For Canadian males of a certain vintage, being a fan of the Tragically Hip is compulsory for maintaining citizenship. It’s true, we can get deported for denouncing the Hip. At the very least, you can get mocked, made fun of, and ostracised for suggesting they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Even a relatively innocuous statement like noting they’ve kinda fallen off in recent years can get you in trouble, as I learned a decade ago in Ottawa. But once, back in the 1990s, the Hip were it. They defined Canada, beyond hockey, beer, and healthcare. And they had a song called “Three Pistols,” ostensibly about the disappearance of iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson in Algonquin Park in Ontario in 1917.
There is a line in that song about bringing on the brand new Renaissance, and this is what I thought about when I read an article in the The Times yesterday about all the money flowing out of Middle Eastern nations into sport, in particular, European sport. Brazil and England played a football friendly in Qatar this week (won, not surprisingly, by Brazil, 1-0). Manchester City FC is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. A Middle Eastern consortium is also sniffing around Liverpool FC, which is buried under massive debt brought on by the club’s current American owners. And, as The Times points out, the Middle East is host to not one, but two Grand Prix races. Britain is in danger of losing its F1 race, and Canada actually did lose its last year, though it’s apparently returning to Montréal this coming year.
Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and other small, wealthy Middle Eastern nations, no larger than an Italian city-state during the Renaissance, really, have sought to diversify their economies away from an over-reliance on oil money, and sport has become their ticket to diversification. All fine and good, no doubt (though there are all kinds of environmental issues involved in the over-development of these city-nations).
But what I find interesting about these Middle Eastern cities appealing to the Wayne Rooneys, Kakas, Tiger Woods, Robinhos, Lewis Hamiltons of the world is that it is entirely reminiscent, culturally-speaking, to the Italian Renaissance. In 15th and 16th century, cities like Florence (under the rule of the Medici), Genoa, Venice, and Milano, competed with each other, inviting famous artists and writers to take up residence. The artists would then be subsidised by the rulers, and charged with producing great art, including and especially public art, to be displayed on the public square, or in the church. Other installations and works of art were for the private collections of the likes of the Medici. But then these cities could use their great art, and the reputations of their artists-in-residence as a means of claiming greater prestige than their neighbours and rivals. This competition between Italian city-states drove the Italian Renaissance, which itself drove the Renaissance northwards and across Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries.
In the Middle East, rather than Leonardo, it’s Robinho called in. Sporting evens in the Middle East not only bring in scads of cash for the local economy, they bring in prestige. The F1 series is the most prestigious racing circuit in the world. And it stops in the Middle East twice, in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. Drawing the greatest football team in the world (Brazil) to play a friendly against the resurgent English side also brings prestige, as does having Tiger Woods design a golf course, as he has done in Dubai.
Qatar is pondering a run at hosting the World Cup in 2022, whilst Dubai is measuring a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Not surprisingly, these are the world’s two largest sporting events, and come not only with economic stimulus for the local economy, but prestige and honour as well.
The Times article rather overlooks the prestige factor here, focussed as it is only on the financial aspects of these sporting events. That is only part of it. The buying power of these Middle Eastern city/nations is only worth so much, the prestige and honour of hosting F1 races, international football friendlies, the World Cup, the Olympics is not to be overlooked, nor is the tourism money. People want to go to Dubai to play on Tiger Woods’ golf course.
[Cross-posted, in slightly different format, at Current Intelligence].
The House of the Irish: The Book
November 15, 2009 § Leave a comment
Well, almost 6 months to the day of defending my dissertation, I am heading out tomorrow to begin, in earnest, work on the book. Now that I have interest, at least, from a publisher, I am getting going on the new research I want to do, and moving forth with the revisions and whatnot. Next weekend or the following one, depending on when I get a bit of time, I am going to re-write the Preface of the dissertation to lay out where I want the book to go, though, of course, that will change a few times as I move forward.
Anyway, tomorrow I am meeting with a former Griffintowner I met at a talk I gave last year, to do an oral history interview. This is kind of exciting for me, and I’m excited to learn that I am not, in fact, sick of Griffintown and its history yet. In fact, I feel rather rejuvenated by 6 months away from it, as I have been immersed in Griffintown lore for most of the past 3 years, since I started writing the dissertation in earnest.
So let us hope the book doesn’t take as long to write as the dissertation did and sometime in the not-too-distant future, The House of the Irish: Diaspora, History & Memory in Griffintown, Montréal, 1900-2010, will be on the shelves of a bookstore near you.
Layers of Diaspora
November 15, 2009 § Leave a comment
Perhaps as a means of avoiding my current research project, which is to turn my dissertation into a monograph, I have been thinking about my next project, the one that will examine diaspora and its multiple layers on the urban landscape. Really, this is a mobile project, can be fit onto any large city with multiple diasporas, but Montréal is where the idea came from, and Montréal appeals to me because of the bifurcated nature of the host cultures here.
Back in the winter of 2006, I taught the History of Montréal, an upper-level course at Concordia. I think this is where this idea comes from for me, I taught that course as an ethnic history of the city. I traced the history of the landscape that is Montréal through the various ethno-religious groups that have called the area home, dating back to the pre-Contact Mohawk populations in the St. Lawrence River Valley, right through to the Vietnamese and various African and Arab diasporas today. As we moved through history, we dealt with the aboriginals, the Contact era, the French colonial culture here, then the onslaught of the British. This set the city up as a multi-layered, bifurcated location, French and English, the aboriginals more or less marginalised on reserves that ring the Île-de-Montréal. French and English were equal but different, though the British were dominant, they being the conquering colonial power.
It was into this milieu that the Irish arrived, becoming the first immigrant group in Montréal. Whilst the other groups, including the aboriginals, arrived at the location, they had done so as colonisers and conquerers, not as immigrants. The Irish set themselves up, established a model of negotiating space for themselves on the emergent urban landscape of Montréal. They found a niche for themselves in the Catholic Church (indeed, it is due to the Irish that there is an Anglo Catholic Church in Montréal today), established various community organisations, etc. Other immigrant groups that followed the Irish to Montréal all copied this model: Jews, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, African Americans (and Canadians), Arabs, Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, etc.
So I visualise these waves of immigration on the urban landscape of Montréal as successive layers building the landscape. I think of this as an archaeology of diasporic Montréal, not unlike Pointe-à-Callière, the archaeological museum down in the Vieux-Port (and, I might add, one of only a very few museums that can hold my attention). But it is not as simple as this, as each successive wave of immigration didn’t further bury the French and British (though aboriginal culture in Montréal seems to have gone further subterranean over the past century, though that is due more to Canadian government policy than immigration), as both have managed to establish and maintain their hold on the city’s culture and landscape.
But, as these immigrant groups are Montréalised, Québcised, or Canadianised (depending on your politics), there is a sanding down of their edges, of their distinct voices, as they are made more and more part of the urban landscape of the city. For some groups, this is a simpler process, like the Irish in the 20th century (before they re-discovered their separate ethnic identity in the mid-to-late 1990s), due to skin colour, language, and/or religion. For other groups, it isn’t so simple, for religious reasons (Jews) or skin colour (Jamaicans, Haitians), or language, or a combination of all three (Arabs). Indeed, of all the constituent elements of “Angl0-Montréal” throughout the last half of the 20th century, only the old-stock Anglo-Irish fully subsumed themselves into this identity/community. Other groups, most notably Jews, maintained their separate identity, in many ways due to the fact that they were never fully welcomed into the Anglo-Irish core of Anglo-Montréal. Nevertheless, there is a process of acculturation and Canadianisation going on here.
But, however one thinks of this process of immigration, retrenchment, and acculturation, I do think that the layer metaphor helps to make sense of the city and its myriad diasporic populations, and the ways in which they interact and influence each other on the urban landscape of the city.
Gender, Religion, and J-Roc
October 10, 2009 § Leave a comment
Christianity has a long history of being a female-gendered religion. I would suggest this derives from the early Christian Church, which saw men and women as equals. It was only the rise of the Vatican in Rome that saw the gradual dissolution of women’s roles in the church.
In the late 19th century, throughout the British Empire, including Canada, there was a massive reinvigoration of mainline Protestant churches. In part, this was driven by the concept of “muscular Christianity”, a doctrine that was used to justify and extend the British imperial project. According to this doctrine, the (white) British Christian man was to give his body and soul over to Jesus. His body was to be his temple. The muscular Christian, then, could be found all over the British Empire, in Africa, in India, extending British dominion over a usually recalcitrant populace. He could also be found in the inner-city of London and Manchester, as well as Montréal and Toronto. The Americans got into the act, too. Indeed, the rise of organised sport, largely centred around Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School and the ubiquitous sport, derived from muscular Christianity, as did the Boy Scouts movement of Lord Baden-Powell in the late 19th century.
But this masculinised Christianity arose in response to the feminisation of these mainline Protestant churches. Women were always the more devout, the ones who actually went to mass, and they began to create space for themselves within the parish, within the church itself. Women’s auxiliaries, in particular, but also other organisations. The Catholic Church, at least in Québec got involved, too, creating groups that were female-centric. The fact that these churches would become feminised is not all that surprising, in many ways. Women were left without recreative spaces through the rise of industrialisation and the middle classes in the 19th century. The advent of domestic servants for large swaths of the population meant that these women had less to do.
Just as their husbands’ masculinity had to change and take into account their new sedentary employment as managers, these bourgeois women’s femininity also shifted. They were no longer so much caregivers and housekeepers, they had free time. But they lived in a world where their public excursions and causes were always going to be limited due to the dominant patriarchal ideals of the day. There were concerns about their safety and security, about the “delicate nature of the fairer sex.” Thus, the church became the ideal location for women. What safer place could there be than God’s house? And so the parish (or whatever you want to call it in whatever Christian church you want to talk about) became this feminised space, just for women.
And men were turned off by the church, hence the response of muscular Christianity.
Recently, I exchanged emails with my CTlab colleague, Marisa Urgo, about American jihadists, and she noted something kind of interesting. She suggested that it makes sense that bored (white) suburban youth in the US would be intrigued by Islam, as it is a very masculine religion, when compared to Christianity. While I am not so interested in the consequences of this, it’s not my area of expertise, I do find the idea of gender and religion really interesting. The fact that a particular disaffected segment of white, suburban youth would be attracted to the masculinist vision of radical Islam is fascinating for all sorts of reasons.
I think there’s also something to be said for the exotic here, much like white suburban boys in the late 80s/early 90s got so fascinated by gangsta rap coming out of Los Angeles and New York City. This was when I was a teenager, and whilst I love hip hop, I never quite understood these guys who became so obsessed with not just the music, but the alleged lifestyle of gangsta rappers, to the point where they began to not only dress like Easy-E and Ice Cube, but they began to commit petty crime and to act like idiots, so that they could be gangsta. You know the type, like J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys
Canada and Its Inferiority Complex
October 6, 2009 § 8 Comments
Last week, I published a review of Canadian journalist John Lorinc’s new book, Cities: A Groundwork Guide, over at the Complex Terrain Laboratory. As much as I liked and enjoyed this book, I found myself wondering, though, as I read this book, was what is with Canadians’, or maybe just Torontonians’, obsession with Toronto?
Toronto is mentioned more than any other city in the world in Lorinc’s book. More than London, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo; more than Nairobi, and New York. Toronto is mentioned more than twice as often as Canada’s other 2 major cities: Montréal and Vancouver. Moreover, Montréal is usually, though not exclusively, mentioned in a negative light. Not Toronto.
We are a nation with an inferiority complex, that I can accept. Toronto’s wiki page, though, is kind of sad, as it has to point out that: “As Canada’s economic capital, Toronto is considered a global city and is one of the top financial centres in the world.” It is indeed a top financial centre in the world, somewhere around 20th. Great. Who cares, really.
Why can’t we just stand on our own merits and not have to defensively point out that we can play with the big boys? I liked Canada more when we were an unassuming nation, proud to be what we are, but not a neighbourhood bully or the whiny little brother of the USA. This inferiority complex is getting out of hand.
And whilst Lorinc, on the one hand, is showcasing Toronto for the domestic audience, it is kind of sad that it has to come at the expense of Montréal and Vancouver, and that Toronto is mentioned more often than any other city in the entire world. Years ago, the Vancouver band, Spirit of the West, wrote a song about this, called “Far Too Canadian;” times have changed, though, we are no longer content to be the unassuming, quiet Canadians. Now we’re becoming a bunch of loudmouths. I like the old way better.
the house of the irish
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
i submitted a book proposal to mcgill-queens university press the other week. i mailed it out monday, i got an email response on thursday. i was astounded canada post could get something somewhere that fast, even if the proposal travelled no more than 3.5km from pointe-saint-charles to mcgill. anyway, mqup liked what they read. they are interested in publishing the book, once it becomes a book.
so now, i am beginning to ponder how to turn “the house of the irish”, the dissertation, into the house of the irish, the book. i am cutting out the first substantive chapter, on the shamrock lacrosse club. that will become an article or two. and i am extending a chapter on nations and nationalism in griffintown, c. 1900-17 to at least 1922, with the establishment of the irish free state. part of my argument is that once ireland gained something approximating independence, even if the north was left out (or, more properly stated, opted out), the irish of the diaspora more or less lost interest in ireland, at least that was, i think, the situation in montréal. ireland was already an imagined nation by the early 20th century on account of there being hardly any irish-born irish in montréal by this time, immigration having dried up shortly after the famine. but after the free state was established, the irish here turned even more inwards. so that’s the first major revision or expansion.
the other is to correct the methodological issues in the last two chapters of the dissertation, which is too much reliance on the same set of sources. to correct this, i am going to engage in some oral history. but i am back to the same problem i had with the dissertation in a sense here. i am not interested in talking to the professional griffintowners, the don pidgeons and denis delaneys of the world. their thoughts and opinions on the griff are very well known, they are part of the commemorative process amongst the griffintown diaspora. i want to talk to people who didn’t necessarily think that they grew up in shangri-la. the ones who have an alternative view of the griff, or at least a more critical one. one former griffintowner in burman’s film said something like it was a shame to see the griff go, as they had it all. oh really? despite the poverty, unemployment, insecurity of tenure, etc.? of course, this is partly nostalgia, partly a child’s view of life in the 1940s. but i want to talk to people who have a more critical memory.
and that’s the hard part. where do i find these people? they’re not the ones at all the various griff gatherings. i have a few ideas, one of which is to make use of the parish of saint-gabriel, the historically irish church in the pointe (in fact, almost next door to us here). i recognise old griffintowners standing outside of saint-gabriel’s every sunday morning, so i’m hoping i can start there, talk to a few of them, get references to their friends, and so on.
either way, i am excited about this, i’m excited to turn this story of griffintown into a book. i think this is a story that has wider implications, not just for montréal, but for the irish diaspora, and even as an example of the acculturation of an ethnic group in a major metropolitan centre in north america.
as my favourite soccer blogger used to say at the end of each post: onwards!
we’re #4!!!
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
the un released its human development index rankings today. canada ranks as the 4th best place in the world to live. not so bad, i suppose, to be ranked #4. it ranks after norway, australia, and iceland. but i find this kind of disturbing, really. norway, fine. i’ve got nothing against norway, nor really australia, either. but iceland? iceland is practically bankrupt, one of the hardest hit nations in the world during the current economic meltdown that we may or may not be recovering from. how that can be translated into a #3 rating is beyond me. but i guess the economy is only part of the hdi, but i do wonder what will happen to iceland next year. and to be fair, iceland did fall from 1st to 3rd this year.
meanwhile, canada. canada spent a long time atop the annual hdi. in 1992, and from 1994 right through to 2000, this was the best place in the world to live, at least as measured by the compilation of statistics by the un. but, hey, that’s not a bad thing. canada was the first dynasty of the hdi, which the un only began publishing in 1990. norway is the current dynasty, having been first from 2001-2006 and now this year, its reign only punctuated by iceland’s two chart toppers in 2007 and 2008.
and whilst canada is by no means a poor place to live, its measurement in the hdi has consistently ranked it in the top 10, most often in the top 5. but this slippage does get me worried in some ways. canada tends to fall down these rankings due to its poor record vis-à-vis the aboriginal population and the vast amount of poverty on reserves around the country, as well as the incredibly difficult circumstances aboriginals in urban areas tend to face. and yet, and yet…every government in the past decade has sworn to do better by the aboriginal population. and every government does nothing. last week, the globe & mail visited what it called “ground zero” of the h1n1 outbreak in canada, an indian reserve at wasagamack, manitoba. wasagamack is an incredibly isolated community, 600 km north of winnipeg, a trip made by air and water taxi.
wasagamack made headlines last month because health canada sent out 200 body bags instead of supplies to fight a possible outbreak of h1n1. this was a great insult, because death is taboo in aboriginal culture, death is not prepared for, death is dealt with when it arrives, but not beforehand.
at any rate, as the newspaper article shows, this nation lags on dealing with the very real threat against the human rights of canadian aboriginals. i have been on reserves in various parts of this country, and in some cases, conditions are appalling. and spare me the rightwing argument they only have themselves to blame. that is utter bullshit. reserves were created on marginal land the country over. traditional ways of life were discouraged by the government, languages were lost, and so on. when “modern” housing was promised, the results were disappointing. places like wasagamck have homes inundated with mould, improper sanitation, like no running water, broken windows, and sagging foundations.
this is a national embarrassment. i recall, back when i worked on aboriginal claims, canada 2000. i lived in ottawa, and i was working on a claim that involved the forced removal of several groups of inuit in northern manitoba and what is now nunavut to new locations. the government, in some cases, claimed it was due to the need for food. the caribou, which the southern inuit relied upon for food, had changed their migration patterns and were experiencing a dip in their population. but rather than let the inuit track their new routes south and west of their location, they were moved to churchill, manitoba, where they were put on the dole and disease stalked them. further north, the inuit were moved around the arctic like pawns on a chessboard for the government, as a means of shoring up canadian sovereignty in the arctic during the cold war (aboriginals and the arctic are two issues in canadian politics where politicians talk the talk but continually fail to walk the walk). and so here i was in ottawa in 2000, 40 years after these events up north. and all i could feel was revulsion at my country, that this was allowed to happen.
one civil servant at northern affairs canada argued, quite forcefully, that the government had done the right thing, that it knew better than the inuit as to how to survive. i was dumbfounded, i was astounded that this attitude still existed in the government.
and meanwhile, each successive government talks about improving the quality of life of aboriginals on and off reserves. and each government fails. even the current conservative government, with a minister of health, leona aglukkaq, who is an inuit from nunavut, has continued to fail. indeed, it was aglukkaq’s government which sent out the body bags to wasagamack.
The Melting Pot of Diasporas
March 26, 2009 § 2 Comments
So, with PhD in hand, I have begun to think about new research projects. One in particular that I am interested in is the plight of diasporas in large, multi-ethnic urban centres in North America. This one came to me in the Mile End of Montréal, today the home of hipsters, artists, and musicians. Indeed, damn near every Montréal band of recent vintage hails from the Mile End: The Arcade Fire, Stars, Patrick Watson, and so on and so forth. Anyway, we were in St. Viateur Bagels, buying bagels, then we planned to head over to Open Da’ Night, the legendary local Italian café, for the best caffé latté in North America. As we made our way along the street, we passed a Greek restaurant, whilst all around the hipsters and pretentiarati, Hasidic Jews made their way to and from synagogue and business. Me, I’m an Irish-Canadian. And, yeah, so, big deal. That’s urban life. But it’s more than that, it’s urban space, it’s identity, and it’s place. How do diasporas mix in the city in North America? How do Hasidic Jews in Montréal maintain their distinct, separate identity in the midst of this urban chaos? What has become of the old Portuguese, Greek, and Italian immigrants of the Mile End? What does it mean to speak the English language in Montréal? Charles Boberg, a linguist at McGill, has postulated that we speak a distinct idiom of English here, influenced as it is by the obvious source: French, but also by words and diction from the diasporic peoples of the city, especially Greeks and Italians. Me, I think about accents in the city, about the different French accents (they vary according to class, location in the city, location in Québec), how the Irish of Verdun speak so differently from the Anglos of Westmount, and the variations of Italian-, Greek-, Portuguese- Montrealers. And what about the cultures? Montréal is famous for, amongst other things, smoked meat, bagels, and poutine. The first two are Jewish delicacies, the last, québécois.
What about music? First there’s the case of the legendary québécois chanteuse, La Bolduc. La Bolduc was born Mary Travers in the Gaspésie in 1894, the daughter of an Irishman and québécois mother. Her music was largely comprised of traditional Irish jigs and reels, over which she sang in québécois French. Today, one of the most popular québécois bands is Les Cowboys Fringants, who play an acoustic, traditional-based rock, and by traditional, I mean québécois. And yet, many of the jigs and reels of the Fringnants’ music are Irish-based.
Indeed, so Irish are Les Cowboys that every time I listen to them, I sometimes forget that they’re québécois, they sound like an acoustic version of the Irish-American “punk” band, Flogging Molly. “Punk” is in quotations because Flogging Molly are more Irish than punk, their punk energy comes from the fast-paced nature of their Irish ditties. Indeed, they’re not unlike Les Cowboys in that sense. At any rate, Flogging Molly originated in Los Angeles, a city not particularly well-known for its Irish diaspora, but very well known for its punk rock.
All of this is still in its infancy, but it is something that I think about as I make my way to and from work, as I interact with my students, and listen to the conversations of the city. As I develop these ideas, watch this space, and the Complex Terrain Laboratory.
Matthew Barlow 