This collection brings together leading scholars from seven institutions in Ireland and seven in Quebec in an interdisciplinary exploration of diverse approaches to the construction of the past, present, and contemporary society in both. In doing so, its principal achievement is that it breaks new theoretical ground and provokes ‘valuable parallel resonances that can deepen scholarly understanding of Ireland and Quebec in their historical and contemporary manifestations’.

But why Ireland and Quebec? Before reading this treatise I would have certainly thought of each of their vibrant cultural identities and the comparable tensions arising out their Roman Catholicism in a Protestant British Empire. And then there have been the ensuing conflicts prompted by religious, language, and cultural differences that resulted in independence for Ireland in 1922 and polarization and conflict in Quebec over the last century. But what also emerges is how both Ireland and Quebec are struggling to define and sustain their core identities as they respond to similar global economic and cultural imperatives. By considering both the genesis and construction of cultural identity and the responses to the contemporary contexts, this exploration of Ireland and Quebec offers insights into these specific places and also to identity theory in general.

As explained by the editors (Kelleher and Kenneally) in the Introduction, the fifteen chapters are arranged in three sections and the first addresses the role of memory and history in Irish–French Canadian connections. Éamon Ó Ciosáin focuses on the migration of the Irish ‘wild geese/Irish brigade’ to France and North America from the seventeenth century that has been ‘occluded’ from historiography and memory. Maurice Bric continues this theme of connection in his analysis of historic interactions between Ireland and French Canada in the period 1760 to 1830 and the support of Lower Canada’s ‘Friends of Ireland’ for Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Roman Catholic emancipation. How this link is reciprocated is central to Louis-Georges Harvey’s discussion of the part played by Ireland and the Irish in ‘Lower Canadian’ political discourse and explores the Irish sympathy for, and participation in, the 1837–8 rebellion. Provocatively, Jean-Phillippe Warren then examines the contribution of Lord Durham’s lenient treatment of political prisoners and how it resonates in the current discourse on collective identity, dialogue, and collaboration. This leads into Michael Kenneally’s analysis of Jan Morgan’s three-volume Chronicle of Lower Canada as a ‘textual vehicle’ for communicating historical data, the power of fiction in re-presenting history for contemporary audiences, and the role of memory in the evolution of individual identity and affiliation as demonstrated in the years of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and the rise of the Parti Québécois.

If remembered history is central to identity formation, the praxis of language is both diagnostic of a culture and crucial to its internal communication of values and an external demonstration of difference. This is the focus of section two, opening with Margaret Kelleher’s analysis of the role of the census as the ‘technology of power’ through ‘demolinguistic enumeration’ which ignored the ‘knotted’ history of bilingualism. The issue of language and identity in post-‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland is addressed by Vera Regan and its experience of changing ‘Irishness’ in her quantitative and qualitative research of the acquisition of vernacular Irish-English by recent newcomers of Polish origin situated in the global–local continuum. The latter context is to the fore in Patricia Lamarre’s differentiation between nationalism and ‘nation-ness’ as revealed by profiles of fifteen young multilingual Montrealers constructed from their own personal interactions and interviews that prompt new thinking about language, territory, and identity in Quebec public policy and the ‘evolving relationship between language and identity’.

Certainly, all theorists of national identity would recognise the power of language but two contributions shift the locus of cultural continuity to the household, kitchen, and domesticity. For Linda Connolly, Irish female domestic-service workers were central actors in the story of the Irish in Quebec, and she explores how the ‘Celtic Tiger’ has had an impact on this former aspect of the traditional family, community, and society. Rhona Kenneally turns her attention to a different dimension of cultural domesticity and performed memory: cookbooks as vehicles of the ‘poetry of house work’ and vehicles for communicating values, beliefs, practices and the role of women in familial and national identity.

Section Three moves onto the realm of performance in music and the theatre. Gearóid Ó Hallmhuráin’s contribution is on the ‘place of sound’ and the ‘sound of place’ as an hitherto unexplored ‘acoustic door to the Irish past in Quebec’ in Douglastown, in the Gaspé region of Quebec. As elsewhere throughout this volume, the challenges posed by cultural hybridity promoted by global flows are again recognised, but it is argued that serving the ‘roots tourism’ of an aging return-diaspora is preserving memory and tradition on this edge of the New World. Next, Harry White locates the culture of music in Quebec and Ireland in present-day musicology and considers the hegemony of classical music compared to ‘traditional’music. His comparison of the ‘topography of musical experience’ results in the conclusion that there is a need for new modes of music history and that the culture of musical practice in Ireland and Quebec can no longer be circumscribed by outmoded concepts of originality or cultural nationalism.

Turning to the contribution of drama to Irish identity, Patrick Lonergan argues that nations are not simply represented but are performed and that contemporary theatre and film are increasingly influenced by politics, tourism, and economic policy. Using three plays, he demonstrates how in this ‘transformational moment’ the sense of community is being influenced by top-down agencies facilitating the movement of capital, goods, and intellectual property, but that this is prompting the emergence of a bottom-up ‘national theatre’ by Irish writers. Erin Hurley’s view of contemporary theatre in Ireland and Quebec is that it has long been privileged as the site for the representation of identity through the construction of imaginative worlds. However, through her discussion of two contemporary plays, she indicts them as crimes against national identity that pose questions about theatrical performances and the restrictions they impose on representations of identity.

Clearly, I am much impressed by the diversity and innovation of this multidisciplinary foray into previously unexplored tangible and intangible dimensions of culture and heritage. I look forward to the reactions of future scholars to future applications in other comparable regions and equally imaginative topics.