{"id":66271,"date":"2015-03-17T09:12:29","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T14:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=66271"},"modified":"2017-09-17T17:55:38","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T22:55:38","slug":"irish-dance-and-the-evolution-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/03\/17\/irish-dance-and-the-evolution-of-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish Dance and the Evolution of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

“No. We\u2019re Italian. We don\u2019t Irish dance,\u201d said<\/a>\u00a0Kristi\u00a0Corcione’s mother in 1973. The proscription wouldn’t last a generation. Today her daughter\u00a0trains\u00a0for the\u00a0World Irish Dance Championships.<\/p>\n

Irish dance has left Ireland and the ethnic communities in which it used to be\u00a0quietly practiced.<\/p>\n

Irish dancing schools have sprung up in Israel, Japan, Norway, Romania, Russia and many other countries not known for their Irish populations. Competitions… can now be found in Hong Kong, Prague and St. Petersburg, among other far-flung cities. More than 5,000 competitors from 20 countries are expected in April at this year\u2019s World Championships in London.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, Siobhan Burke gives the credit to Riverdance, a\u00a0phenom that “exporting [Irish dance]\u00a0to an international audience of more than 24 million.”<\/p>\n

The spread of Irish dance is a\u00a0great example of the social construction and evolution of our invented concepts of race and ethnicity.<\/p>\n

When it was whites who made up the majority of U.S. immigrants, it really mattered if you were Irish, Italian, or some other white ethnicity. The Irish, in particular, were denigrated<\/a> and dehumanized<\/a>. If one wasn’t Irish, it certainly wasn’t a group that most people would want to associate themselves with.<\/p>\n

Over generations, though, and as new immigrant groups came in and were contrasted to Europeans, the distinctions between white ethnics began to fade. Eventually, ethnicity became optional<\/a> for white people. They could claim an ethnicity, or several, of their choice; others would accept whatever they said without argument; or they could say they were just American.<\/p>\n

Once the distinctions no longer mattered and the stigma of being Irish had faded, then Irish dance could be something anyone did and others would want to do. And, so, now anyone does. The three-time winner of the\u00a0All-Ireland Dancing Championship in Dublin is a biracial, black, Jewish kid from Ohio<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, the\u00a0big Irish dance production\u00a0is\u00a0\u201cHeartbeat of Home,\u201d a show that Burke describes as a “multicultural fusion” that delivers “plenty of solid Irish dance steps.” Irish dance is evolving, borrowing and melding with other cultural traditions\u00a0— and it increasingly belongs to everyone —\u00a0in the great drama of ethnic and racial invention and re-invention.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much to @Mandahl<\/a>, a proud grandmother of two world class Irish dancers, for suggesting I write about this!<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“No. We\u2019re Italian. We don\u2019t Irish dance,\u201d said\u00a0Kristi\u00a0Corcione’s mother in 1973. The proscription wouldn’t last a generation. Today her daughter\u00a0trains\u00a0for the\u00a0World Irish Dance Championships. Irish dance has left Ireland and the ethnic communities in which it used to be\u00a0quietly practiced. Irish dancing schools have sprung up in Israel, Japan, Norway, Romania, Russia and many other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8070,16039,64,253,1817,283,285,23665,20063,1757,293,108],"class_list":["post-66271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-artliterature","tag-dance","tag-globalization","tag-history","tag-nation-ireland","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-history","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-construction","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66271"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71715,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66271\/revisions\/71715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}