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This book addresses a topic of increasing importance to artists, art historians and scholars of cultural studies, migration studies and international relations: migration as a profoundly world-transforming force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices across the world. It explores contemporary art’s entanglement and critical engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source to improving our understanding of how these processes transform identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. Focusing on the interrelations between transcultural identities, the paradoxes of globalisation and the experience of migration as structured by both mobility and settlement, longing and belonging, identification and disidentification, it contributes knowledge about three interwoven issues of enduring interest. Firstly, it is concerned with identity and belonging because migration challenges the identities of the people who migrate but also of the communities where migrants settle. The second set of issues revolves around visibility and recognition. Which impact does increased mobility have on the art world and the careers and works of artists? How have the discursive, structural and artistic changes paved the way for the idea of ‘global art’ and a growing institutional visibility and recognition of artists with a migrant background? Thirdly, the book is concerned with the question of the interrelations between aesthetics and politics and how aesthetics, politics and ethics may be balanced in artistic representations of migration, especially forced migration.

Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland is the first full-length monograph in the market to address the impact that Celtic-Tiger immigration has exerted on the poetry, drama and fiction of contemporary Irish writers. The book opens with a lively, challenging preface by Prof. Declan Kiberd and is followed by 18 essays by leading and prestigious scholars in the field of Irish studies from both sides of the Atlantic who address, in pioneering, differing and thus enriching ways, the emerging multiethnic character of Irish literature. Key areas of discussion are: What does it mean to be ‘multicultural,’ and what are the implications of this condition for contemporary Irish writers? How has literature in Ireland responded to inward migration? Have Irish writers reflected in their work (either explicitly or implicitly) the existence of migrant communities in Ireland? If so, are elements of Irish traditional culture and community maintained or transformed? What is the social and political efficacy of these intercultural artistic visions? While these issues have received sustained academic attention in literary contexts with longer traditions of migration, they have yet to be extensively addressed in Ireland today. The collection will thus be of interest to students and academics of contemporary literature as well as the general reader willing to learn more about Ireland and Irish culture. Overall, this book will become most useful to scholars working in Irish studies, contemporary Irish literature, multiculturalism, migration, globalisation and transculturality. Writers discussed include Hugo Hamilton, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Dermot Bolger, Chris Binchy, Michael O'Loughlin, Emer Martin, and Kate O'Riordan, amongst others.