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This article focuses on the Ireland’s cultural project in the age of globalization through the American in three plays by Friel, The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, and Give Me Your Answer, Do!. All three plays dramatize the conflicts and exchanges between the American, an intellectual, who tries to understand Ireland by constructing her as an object of investigation, and the Irish who define themselves against the national other. The American intellectuals attempt to investigate an aspect of Irish culture and turn it into an object of analysis framed by an American discourse which is destabilized by the Irish counter-language. In these plays neither Irish nor American discourse can claim indisputable ownership of authority and truth. Instead the plays construct a diversified ideological and cultural field against claims for global homogeneity. In a context of varied collective identities permeated by contradictions and fragmentation, the divided self is preferable to the notion of a homogeneous and unified identity. The analysis of this juxtaposition has a twofold function: first, it reveals the relationship between power and knowledge as the American attempts to define and thus immobilize Ireland; second, the principle of permanent and absolute cultural difference is dismantled as the American occasionally desires and ultimately finds in Irish culture what is missing from his own; in the process a split self emerges. But the Irish, too, are occasionally involved in this gesture of the divided self.