The city that received the Famine ships marks June 16 — from Dorchester to Jamaica Plain, and why Joyce still matters to the Irish-American community that never forgot where it came from.
More Irish-Americans live in the greater Boston area than in any comparable region outside Ireland. When June 16 arrives, the city's relationship with James Joyce is complicated, specific, and — in the pubs of Dorchester and Jamaica Plain — entirely genuine.
Boston has a stronger claim on Irish literary culture than almost any American city. Massachusetts received Famine emigrants in enormous numbers — the Irish community that built South Boston, Dorchester, and Charlestown in the 1840s and 1850s is still present in those neighbourhoods, and its relationship with Irish literature is complicated, specific, and deeply felt.
Bloomsday in Boston is smaller than Chicago or New York, but it is genuine. The city's Irish pubs, community centres, and universities mark the day — and the Boston Irish community, which has always been keenly aware of its literary heritage, responds to Joyce even when it finds him difficult.
Doyle's Café on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain is one of the oldest Irish pubs in Boston and has hosted informal Bloomsday readings for years. The pub draws from the Jamaica Plain Irish community and from Boston's literary crowd — an overlap that is larger in Boston than elsewhere. Joyce readings begin in the early evening and continue until the barman calls time.
The Eire Pub on Adams Street in Dorchester — one of the most politically and culturally significant Irish-American pubs in the United States — has hosted Bloomsday readings as part of its calendar of Irish community events. Dorchester's Irish-American community, among the most cohesive in the country, regards Joyce as complicated but significant.
The Boston area has some of the highest concentrations of Irish-American families in the country. Surnames like Sullivan, McCarthy, O'Brien, Kennedy, Ryan, and Brennan are so common in certain Boston neighbourhoods that they barely register as unusual. These are the surnames of the counties Joyce was writing about — Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary — and their presence in Dorchester, South Boston, and Jamaica Plain is a direct result of the migrations that Joyce documented by absence.
Boston's universities — Boston College, Northeastern, Harvard, Boston University — all have strong Irish studies programmes, and Bloomsday often appears in their academic calendars. Boston College's Irish Studies programme is one of the largest in the United States, and the O'Neill Library holds significant Joyce collections. The academic Bloomsday and the community Bloomsday coexist in Boston in a way that is rarer elsewhere.
Joyce was born 38 years after the Famine ended. The Dublin he wrote about in 1904 was still a city living in the shadow of what had happened in 1845-1852 — a city where half the country had emigrated or died within living memory, where the economic consequences of the Famine were still shaping every aspect of life.
Boston's Irish-American community is the direct product of that catastrophe. The Famine ships that arrived in East Boston in the 1840s brought the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people who now celebrate Bloomsday in Dorchester. When Joyce writes about ordinary life in an ordinary Irish city, he is writing about the world those emigrants left. Bloomsday in Boston is, at some level, a remembrance.
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