This article deals with two novels by the Irish writer Colum McCann: Songdogs and This Side of Brightness. Reading the narratives of both texts through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, the essay reveals how McCann's characters undergo processes of liminal experience, which occasion structural changes in their familial relationships and in their individual identity. Turner's work primarily focused on the ritual behaviours of tribal groups and how liminality was used as a physical means toward spiritual ends; I diagnose similar dynamics in McCann's two literary fictions.
IIn 1798 the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the USA as a response to the recent influx of insurrectionary political ideas from Europe and to the arrival of revolutionary French and Irish republican political activists over the previous decade.1 The Irish, in particular, were adjudicated to be constitutively incapable of participating in the rarefied, civil climes of the new American Republic, and, indeed, were more often identified with the unruly hordes of Native American 'wild men' in contemporary homologies of ethnic difference. The Acts were part of the broader moral panic that characterised the birth pangs of the newly inaugurated American polity, and Irish emigrant populations, who had been encoded as racially inferior in Britain, were now received under commensurate categories in the New World. The dissolute Irish national character had long been ratified in British colonial discourse; in addition, the rugged topography of the island, the emotional excesses of its population and their lavishly incomprehensible patois were contributory factors in such sectarian schematisations. And when significant numbers of Irish began to export themselves both East and West, it was as if a contagion had been released from the relative security of its island confines. The Alien and Sedition Acts were symptomatic, then, of more lateral political, philosophical and anthropological campaigns, which were pursued into the nineteenth century. Under these measures the incoming and resident Irish were demonised in terms of their rabid infective interiority within the respective British and American bodies politic. While the epidemiological and racial contiguity of the Irish short-circuited prejudice at 'face value', national character, superstition, revolutionary disposition, creed, lack of hygiene and retarded intelligence were corralled as definitive markers of ethnic distinction. In this way mobility into the urban heartlands of modernity, the very cores of economic and political hegemony, by so-called 'first peoples', engendered a reactionary mentality within these seats of authority. Such acute cultural hybridity dilutes *
