Alice Attie showed me her photographs of Harlem. The images haunted me and interpellated me as a New Yorker. A month before this, twenty-one photographs of the base of the eleventh-century Brihadiswara temple in Thanjavur, taken in 1858 by a captain in the British army, had beckoned. What was that interpellation? I have not come to grips with that one yet, but it launched me for a while on the question of photographs and evidence of identity. Harlem moved on to a big map. In Dublin I could juxtapose the Harlem images with allochthonic Europe. What is it to be a Dubliner? Romanian, Somali, Algerian, Bosnian Dubliners? What is it to be a high-tech Asian Dubliner, recipient of the 40 percent of offi cial work permits? Diversity is class differentiated. How does the anti-immigration platform “Return Ireland to the Irish” relate to the ferocious dominant-sector culturalism that is reconstituting Harlem today? A class argument subsumed under this culturalism, pronouncing received antiglobalization or pro-working-class pieties, will nicely displace the question. This became part of my argument.
