“You know more than you pretend”: Passing, Jazz Inversion, and the Spectre of Reductive Racial Equivalence in Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004)

Abstract

This essay explores how Doyle’s novel utilises the jazz aesthetic to demythologise some of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions around historical migration. Adopting a bifocal approach to Irish travel, it looks back to when the novel was published, a period characterised by sustained net in-migration to Ireland, from our current vantage point, which has witnessed the emergence of new far-right political parties in Ireland and a spike in violent anti-migrant criminality. This essay argues that Doyle’s reimagining of the Jazz Age allows him to move beyond the constraints imposed by the short story format in which he initially addressed the subject of racism in contemporary Ireland, i.e. the serialised stories published in the Irish multicultural monthly newspaper, Metro Éireann.