________________________________ ISSN 1699-311X Estudios Irlandeses , Issue 16, 2021, pp. 196-204 https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2021-10080 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ AEDEI Why Ireland and Irish Studies in South America? Laura P. Z. Izarra Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil Copyright (c) 2021 by Laura P. Z. Izarra. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access. When Declan Kiberd rightly asks “who invented Ireland?” in the introduction of his renowned Inventing Ireland (1995), he points out three possibilities: the Irish themselves, embodied in the words Sinn Féin (ourselves alone) which refer to the movement for national independence; the English fictional construction in response to a specific moment in British history, whose way of thinking was challenged by the 1916 insurrection; and, the massive emigration of hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women after the famines of the 1840s, “going to Britain, North America and Australia dreaming of a homeland, and committed to carrying a burden which few enough on native grounds still bothered to shoulder: an idea of Ireland” (2). Though the Irish in South America have not been in the scope 1 of Irish historians and critics until the first decade of this century, Latin American scholars have been examining the Irish presence in their region since the early twentieth century, and these results should be inscribed in the global Irish agenda. And, why has Ireland been the focus of non-English speaking countries across the Atlantic? Works of art are products of their age and Kiberd (1995) affirms that “certain masterpieces float free of their enabling conditions to make their home in the world” (4). Irish writers have been part of the syllabus of English Literature in the educational system worldwide and it was the Irish Renaissance led by W.B. Yeats and the legacy left by his generation, together with the history of Irish emigration to their lands, that awoke the interest of South Americans. If artworks have always been notable for their engagement with society and “for [their] prophetic reading of the forces at work in their time” (ibid. ibidem), people from these South American countries read Irish authors because they share a similar past of colonial experience and still live the painful process of emerging nation-states. Although the wars of Independence in South America occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century –a century before the Irish Independence– some Irish immigrants and their descendants were revolutionary leaders in the struggles against the dominant power of Spain. 2 For instance, William Bulfin was an Irish diasporic writer who lived in Argentina for 22 years and was the editor of the Irish community’s newspaper The Southern Cross from 1896 to 1906 (still being printed today), who ironically complains in his book Rambles in Eireen (1907) that these Irish heroes should be in Ireland fighting for their own independence: “Glory of the Irish in exile! […] Of what good is it all to Ireland? The battle for Ireland must be fought in Ireland, by the people of Ireland” (247). In tandem with Kiberd’s reasoning, the fact that a cultural revival came first and inspired the Irish political revolution that followed, the presence of a conscious national and artistic intensity in Irish artworks, and the