Mixed Race Studies

The Truth About Dublin—An Unfair City

The Evening Herald
Dublin, Ireland
2010-10-02

Zélie Asava

The tradition of a big Irish welcome isn’t always evident to a mixed-race Irish woman in Dublin, writes Zélie Asava

“So where are you from?”

“Dublin .”

“No, like originally”

This is a conversation I have with people on average once every two days. I am a mixed-race Irish woman. But when I tell people that I’m Irish they ask: “Where are you really from?” Instead of red hair and freckles, I have brown hair and skin. Sometimes I tell people I’m from London. After that they don’t ask again because London—unlike Dublin—is regarded as a racial melting pot.

The alternative involves explaining why and how I am from Dublin—where I was born, where my mother is from, where I went to school, where my father is from, and of course, how he met my mother. This sparks other questions like: “How would a Kenyan ever meet an Irish woman?” And: “Are you from Africa?” Understandably, when you’re having the same conversation over and over again, this gets tiresome…

Read the entire article here.

Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

Wide Screen
Volume 2, Number 1, June 2010
15 pages
ISSN: 1757-3920
Published by Subaltern Media

Zélie Asava

‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.

I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan.  It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status.  It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.

The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors.  But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity.  It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space.  It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film).  Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema

Old Ireland, New Irish: ‘The same people living in the same place’: American Conference for Irish Studies 2009
‘Into the heartland of the ordinary’: Second Galway Conference of Irish Studies 2009

Hosted by
Centre for Irish Studies
National University of Ireland, Galway
2009-06-10 through 2009-06-13

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

This paper explores representations of ethnicity and gender in The Nephew and The Front Line, Irish films which feature mixed-race and black male protagonists, and so reflect the changing face of the nation in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as well as reflecting contemporary concerns regarding the histories and transformations of Irish identity and tradition.

Historically the mixed/black body formed a canvas for Western conceptual theories of blackness, as Fanon noted: ‘I am overdetermined from without’.v In the last 20 years mixed/black actors have featured in several Irish films – Pigs, The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Irish Jam, Breakfast on Pluto, Isolation and Boy Eats Girl – as prostitutes, single mothers, rappers and social contaminants. The transnational migratory bodies of The Nephew and The Front Line will be explored as revealing new directions in Irish cinema which attempt to deconstruct the mixed/black body, multiculturalism and the ‘new Irish’.

The discourses of ‘race’ and gender expressed in these two films portray ‘the possibility of a very differenced Ireland in the world’ which Gerardine Meaney observes may reconfigure the field of Irish Studies. They represent and reinvent public and private identities by projecting non-white Irish identity onto an Irish landscape in order to bring this social demographic from the margins to the centre of Irish visual culture.