¿Por qué Irlanda y los estudios irlandeses en Sudamérica?

Resumen

When Declan Kiberd rightly asks “who invented Ireland?” in the introduction of his renowned Inventing Ireland (1995), he points out three possibilities: the Irish themselves, embodied in the words Sinn Féin (ourselves alone) which refer to the movement for national independence; the English fictional construction in response to a specific moment in British history, whose way of thinking was challenged by the 1916 insurrection; and, the massive emigration of hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women after the famines of the 1840s, “going to Britain, North America and Australia dreaming of a homeland, and committed to carrying a burden which few enough on native grounds still bothered to shoulder: an idea of Ireland” (2). Though the Irish in South America have not been in the scope¹ of Irish historians and critics until the first decade of this century, Latin American scholars have been examining the Irish presence in their region since the early twentieth century, and these results should be inscribed in the global Irish agenda.