Postcolonial Artist: Johnny Doran and Irish Traveller Tradition

The postcolonial experience, as explored by the authors of this volume, focuses on the complex set of cultural and ethnographic processes and strategies of resistance that are the diasporic or migrant Irish experience. As a minority inhabiting the margins of society, Irish Travellers frequently found themselves excluded to the periphery of those unitary constructions of Irishness that accompanied the early decades of Irish independence. Straddling the Traveller/Settled divide, Johnny Doran, whose career reached its zenith in the 1940s, was one of the foremost Irish Traveller artists to have influenced the development of the Irish cultural and musical tradition. As a primarily non-literate group, Irish Travellers, have, in the postcolonial era at least, had very little input into the way in which they have been constructed or represented in the Irish cultural imaginary. This book is a small attempt to redress this imbalance. In exploring the Traveller historical experience through the musical oeuvre of one man, it outlines the importance of human agency, cultural hybridity and cross-cultural borrowing and appropriation within the context of the shifting power relations and images that defined postcolonial Ireland.