On June 24

On this day in ...
... 1995 (15 years ago today), world leaders gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the post-World War II conference that ended with the signing of the U.N. Charter on June 26, 1945. A San Francisco Chronicle article published on this day attributed the Charter's opening, "We the Peoples," to drafters' desire to

inspire people to support the United Nations and help the charter last, as it has for a half-century.

Among the world leaders wide awake in the wee hours of that San Francisco morning was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whom live Johannesburg TV showed celebrating at an Irish pub with Ireland-born Maggie King and other South Africans as they watched South Africa win the Rugby World Cup -- playing on its home field in its 1st such international tournament since the end of apartheid. Hours later Maggie, whose mother is the subject of a prior post, celebrated again -- this time below a mast flying the Jolly Roger and a plaque honoring Harry Bridges at the Fishermen’s and Seamen’s Memorial Chapel (left), for the marriage of her brother, Peter O'Neill, to yours truly at bayside midsummer nuptials pictured here. It was, according to the Chron, the hottest day of San Francisco's century. The following 15 years, equally magical!

(Prior June 24 posts here, here, and here.)

Read On! Black and Green Atlantic

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading) It's my great pleasure to announce a new work hot off the presses, available just in time for holiday giving. It's The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.

Co-edited by up-and-coming scholar Peter D. O'Neill (my dearest), Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of Southern California, and David Lloyd, Professor of English at USC, the book collects truly interdisciplinary explorations of the transoceanic experiences of women and men who migrated from Africa and Ireland. As the publisher puts it:

For centuries, African and Irish people have traversed the Atlantic, as slaves, servants, migrants, exiles, political organizers and cultural workers. Their experiences intersected; their cultures influenced one another. These essays explore the connections that have defined the 'Black and Green Atlantic' in culture, politics, race and labour.

Experts in this discourse will recognize that in undertaking these examinations, the collection builds upon the "extraordinarily influential" book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1992 by Paul Gilroy, since 2005 holder of a chair in social theory at the London School of Economics.

Peter and David each contributed an essay, both of much interest to anyone who studies theories of the state or issues of race and gender: Peter's is entitled "Laundering Gender: Chinese Men and Irish Women in Late Nineteenth-Century San Francisco"; David's, "Black Irish, Irish Whiteness and Atlantic State Formation."

Also of note are the many contributions by women scholars; specifically, "Fenian Fever: Circum-Atlantic Insurgency and the Modern State" by Amy E. Martin; "Green Presbyterians, Black Irish and Some Literary Consequences" by Nini Rodgers; "How Irish Maids are Made: Domestic Servants, Atlantic Culture, and Modernist Aesthetics" by Marjorie Howes; "Freeing the Colonized Tongue: Representations of Linguistic Colonization in Marlene Norbese Philip's and Eavan Boland's Poetry" by Stacy J. Lettman; "Beyond the Pale: Green and Black and Cork" by Lee Margaret Jenkins; "To redeem our colonial character: Slavery and Civilization in R. R. Madden's A Twelvemonths Residence in the West Indies" by Fionnghuala Sweeney; and "Declaring Differently: The Transatlantic Black Political Imagination and Mid-Twentieth Century Internationalisms" by Anne W. Gulick.

Rounding out the collection are: "White Skin, Green Face: House of Pain and the Modern Minstrel Show" by Mark Quigley; "Samuel Beckett and the Black Atlantic" by Jonathan Tadashi Naito; "Transatlantic Fugue: Self and Solidarity in the Black and Green Atlantics" by Michael Malouf; "Martyrs for Contending Causes: David Walker, John Mitchel and the Limits of Liberation" by Anthony R. Hale; "Embodied Perception and Utopian Movements: Connections Across the Atlantic" by Denis O'Hearn; and last but by no means least, "Ventriloquizing Blackness: Eugene ONeill and Irish-American Racial Performance" by Cedric J. Robinson.

Heartfelt congratulations!

On January 30, ...

... 1972, in Derry, the 2d largest city in the North of Ireland, British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civil rights demonstrators. In the end 14 persons died, all but 1 on the day, and others were wounded. In the Associated Press photo at left, Father Edward Daly waves a white hankerchief as others carry a casualty out of the line of fire.
Among those present on that Bloody Sunday was a youth who'd celebrated his 18th birthday just weeks before. When the shooting started he crouched behind a concrete abutment, just yards away from some of those who died. On the anniversary of the event in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed by Peter D. O'Neill, that youth. The op-ed appeared on what happened to be the day of the much-vaunted elections in Iraq. O'Neill noted that after the shootings in Derry the local people had turned away from occupying troops, and, in words that proved sadly prophetic, wrote of his concern that the same thing might happen in Iraq:

It is the lesson of Bloody Sunday that, from Fallujah to Nasiriyah, from Mosul to Baghdad, we can expect violence every day that foreign troops remain on Iraq's soil. We can hope for no positive change without a full withdrawal of coalition forces -- a solution called for this week by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma -- so that Iraqis may take the lead in their own affairs. Based on Bush's second inaugural address, however, we can look only to four more years of unlearned and ineffective policy. And so we can muster no optimism about today's elections in Iraq.

... 1913, Britain's House of Lords rejected a bill that would have accorded to Ireland Home Rule, a modicum of self-government.

War's holiday toll

2 photos taken 1 day apart on a Midwestern roadtrip Independence Day week speak volumes about the toll that war is taking on women, as well as children and men, throughout the countryside:



4th of July parade, Central Avenue, Evanston, Illinois: Code Pink & consœurs march against war. (photo by Peter D. O'Neill)




July 5, Wayne's Family Restaurant, Oconto, Wisconsin. Just to the left of the kitchen, a memorial to a fallen waitress: Army Pfc. Nichole M. Frye, killed at age 19 by a roadside bomb 3-1/2 years ago in Baqubah, Iraq. "She made the dinner rush fun," a coworker wrote in tribute.

And just over the border, where Canada Day was celebrated July 1, flags in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, are flying at half-staff following last Wednesday's fatal roadside-bombing of 6 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. The soldiers' widows have requested privacy in their time of grief.

On June 23, ...

... 1888, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Frederick Douglass (right), the abolitionist and women's suffragist who had escaped slavery in 1838 and written and spoken out about his experiences ever since, became the 1st American of African ancestry proposed for nomination as President of the United States. Benjamin Harrison would win the GOP nomination 2 days later; soon after his election, Harrison named Douglass U.S. minister to Haiti. (For an excellent analysis of Douglass' transformative midcentury journey to famine-struck Ireland, see Peter D. O'Neill, “Frederick Douglass and the Irish,” 5 Foilsiú 57 (2006) (available here).
... 1894, the International Olympic Committee, an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, was founded as a means to revive the famed athletic games of ancient Greece.