Mixed Race Studies

Culture File – Race and the Irish Screen

RTÉ Lyric FM
2014-05-15

Fin Keegan, Host

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

What can the Irish horror movie tell us about attitudes to race? And can a mixed race guard [police] in an Irish crime series, ever be just a guard? Dr. Asava is the author of Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Irish Identities on Film and TV (Peter Lang, 2013).

Download the interview here.

Interview with Carole Brennan from Mixed Race Irish

Een Vlaming in Ierland/ A Fleming in Ireland
2014-03-28

Roos Demol

It has been quite a week in Ireland, with the new problems for Mr Shatter, the news that over 2000 phone calls were taped in Garda offices around the country, which could bring a lot of current and old court cases in jeopardy,the press had a busy time and mr. Shatter is very troubled.

But that hasn’t affected our normal every day lives.

However, since I started my (voluntay) job with the online radio, Irish Radio International, where I have my own show, The New Rebels, aimed at the immigrant society here and their families abroad and since I have touched the problem of racism, I am regularly confronted with some very difficult truths.

It is of course easy to ignore all that and keep on blogging about all the good things in Ireland (of which there are many), but I think we all have a repsonsibiloity in revealing truth, however unpleasant that truth may be.

I connected with a lady from London, Carole Brennan, who is a co-founder of the recently established Mixed Race Irish group, an association of Irish people with African dads and Irish mothers, born in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and often raised in industrial schools here in Ireland, where they were often psychologically, physically and even sexually abused…

Listen to the interview here.

Christine Buckley helped shift cultural axis on child abuse

The Irish Times
2014-03-12

Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent

From Broadstreet.ie

Those who insist that history is about movements not individuals might reflect on the achievements of Christine Buckley.

Her story is history as driven by one person. She was an original, a pioneer in exposing how badly this State “cherished” many of its children, whatever their age, throughout most of the 20th century, up to 1996 when the last Magdalene laundry closed. If a high point of much of her work was then taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s 1999 apology on behalf of the State to all who had been in residential institutions as children, as well as his announcement then of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Commission) and the setting up of the Residential Institutions Redress Board, it was not all.

It is no exaggeration to claim that such huge shift in the cultural axis of Ireland, made possible by Christine Buckley, paved the way for the Murphy Commission which investigated the handling of clerical sexual abuse allegations in Dublin and Cloyne dioceses, as well as the McAleese committee which investigated the Magdalene laundries…

…Her own story, as we now know, was in many ways typical. Through its telling she liberated others to do likewise, and not just from an institutional context. Writing in this newspaper in 1997 she recalled: “My mother lived within 20 minutes of the orphanage where I was placed as a child. I never knew it. Nobody seemed to know it. After a two-year courtship she took the baby boat to England in 1946 to hide, to wait and to give birth to her dark secret.

“She forgot to tell my father that she was separated from her husband. She forgot to tell him she already had children, one of them in an institution. Two weeks after my birth we returned to Ireland. My father refused to support her. The following day she placed me with, an adoption agency, vehemently refusing to sign the adoption papers and nobody asked her why.

“Guilt ridden, my father tracked me down six months later in a baby home. For six years he was the pivot of my life until one Saturday he never came back.”…

…Her campaign began after she met her birth mother for the first time in 1985. Three years later she travelled to Nigeria to meet her father. She “told him about my life in Goldenbridge . . . and how I intended to go public about the horrors of that place once he returned to Ireland to meet my children.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television [Galvin Review]

Film Ireland
Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland
2014-01-13

Steven Galvin, Editor

Dr Zélie Asava introduces her book The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television, a critical investigation of race in contemporary Irish visual culture which explores concepts of Irish identity, history and nation in relation to screen representations of those who have become known as the ‘new Irish’.

In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the ‘new Irish’. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. 2013 has seen a plethora of Irish films exploring the interstices of identity, borderlands and cross-cultural communications in the Irish space: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave features Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender and Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga in a slavery-era narrative; Neil Jordan’s Byzantium features Saoirse Ronan as an English vampire who falls in love with an all-too human Irish-American in Britain and brings him to Ireland to become immortal; Paula Kehoe’s An Dubh ina Gheal [Assimilation] looks at the Irish-Aborigines’ of Australia, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy positions the Irishman within a transnational, interracial context in Mister John; the Boorsma brothers’ Milo utilizes the racial narrative of ‘passing’ to illuminate issues of disability and discrimination, centralising an Irish family who are also Dutch-Romanian; and Ama’s storyline on Fair City examines the position of illegals in Ireland and the challenges of blending distinctly different cultural values.

As Fintan O’Toole notes, there is no genuine newness in the ‘new Irish’, as Ireland has a history of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, but ‘understanding globalization in the Irish context is as much a task of remembrance as it is of encountering the new’ (2009: viii). Following O’Toole, my book aims to connect the ‘dislocated continuity’ of racial discourses which have been circulating for many hundreds of years in Ireland and highlights the need to break down essentialist conceptualisations of Irishness by asserting its diversity, nonfixity and instability.  As racial representations tend to be focused on black/white issues, the book reflects this by looking at dominant screen representations of the ‘new Irish’ as non-white. However, it does also examine other marginalised identities in Ireland by referencing Jewish, Romanian, Traveller and a variety of Eastern European characters in brief. There is still much more work to be done on this subject and it is my hope that this book will serve as a contribution to that dialogue. The book asks how and why black and mixed-race characters are represented in Irish screen culture, and how this fits into broader shifts in the visual industries, in national politics and in the international landscape…

Read the entire review here.

Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

The Irish Times
Dublin, Ireland
2013-11-18

Marie O’Halloran, Parliamentary Reporter

‘I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs’

A campaign has been launched for recognition of mixed-race survivors of institutional abuse who believe they suffered racism while in State care.

Rosemary Adaser and Evon Brennan of the campaign group Call to Action Mixed Race Irish, have 20 members, but believe there are about 200 Irish people of mixed race who were in institutional care here between the 1950s and 1980s.

Ms Brennan, a London-based singer-songwriter, said they were looking at the “colour-specific nature of abuse”. That abuse “has been under the radar all these years” and they want an acknowledgement that “Ireland in the ’50s and ’60s was a racist country”…

…Ms Adaser said: “The key point is that if you were mixed race back in the ’50s and ’60s you were 99 per cent sure of being put in an institution.”

Put into State care at the age of three months, she was in homes on the Navan Road, Dublin, and spent 11 years in St Joseph’s, Kilkenny, where her baby son was forcibly taken from her by the nuns when she was 17.

‘Performing monkey’

“I have absolutely nothing good to say about it. I was the only black girl there, seen as an oddity, treated as an alien, at best a performing monkey, at worst a savage, a savage to be civilised.

“I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs on the farm. That’s where I was told I belonged.”…

Read the entire article here.

Book review: The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

Film Ireland
Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland
2013-11-19

Sarah Griffin

Zélie Asava, The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 2013)

Sarah Griffin welcomes Zélie Asava‘s book that applies divergent theoretical concepts of Irishness, whiteness, gender and the particular place of the ‘other’ to the ‘conceptual whiteness of Irishness itself’.

While the intricacies of white and non-white filmic representation has been a subject of much study, most particularly in relation to Hollywood’s output, there has been less focused investigation into the particular relationship Ireland has to its own ‘whiteness’ and how that translates on our big and little screens.  Zélie Asava does so here, bringing together theorists and researchers from disparate decades and tying their ideas to a particularly Irish situation—a country that has only begun to integrate the multicultural nature of a relatively recently expanded populace.  From Sigmund Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’, Julie Kristeva’s abjection, Richard Dyer’s seminal contributions to the study of whiteness, and Judith Butler’s performativity, to the more recent work of Diane Negra on ‘off-white Hollywood’ and a compendium of Irish contributors, Asava blends theorists and personal experience (as an Irish/Kenyan actor) to position herself at the front line.  This book provides a welcome opportunity to apply divergent theoretical concepts of Irishness, whiteness, gender and the particular place of the ‘other’ to, as she calls it, “the conceptual whiteness of Irishness itself”…

Read the entire review here.

Irish and white-ish mixed “race” identity and the scopic regime of whiteness

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 27, Issue 4, October–November 2004
pages 385-396
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.007

Angeline D. Morrison
Falmouth College of Arts, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom

When speaking about the paradoxical “invisibility” of whiteness, I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to “make whiteness strange”, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of whiteness with unquestioned normality with the human condition Dyer points out that the unspoken understanding that whiteness is not a “raced” condition has very specific implications for the balance of power. “There is no more powerful position than being ‘just’ human. The claim of power is the claim to speak for the commodity of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race” (Dyer, 1997, p. 2). Like blackness, whiteness is not reducible to a matter of simple visual appearance. However, when historical and political circumstances allow the conflation of the so-called “ideals” of whiteness–Enlightenment ideals such as literacy, civilisation, artistic creativity, scientific excellence, power, dignity, assumed superiority and so on—with a particular “race” or skin color (here, “white”), things start getting dangerous. The visual becomes vital, and the optical surface of the “raced” subject is imbued with I hyper-significance that can be very uncomfortable to wear. When this subject is of mixed “race” and thus occupies a range of different possible positions within, without, around and between the binary categories, difficulties can arise.

I use the term “mixed race” mindfully, aware that the term is contested by some, while others warn against its reference to die unscientific non-sense of “race” (Gilroy, 2000). Therefore, for the purposes of this article only, I want to define “mixed race” people as the offspring of one white and one non-white parent. If racialized society relies on the false foundational Logocentric binary “black white”, then it follows that it will taxonomize its subjects accordingly. Sander H. Gilman points out that, “. . .in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity.” (Gilman, 1985, p. 231).

Concentrating on the visual, this article intends to use the figure of the mixed “race” subject to investigate the particular scopic regime of whiteness. I wish to consider some of the things that the dominant scopic regime accords visibility to, and some of those it does not. Clearly, what ends up being seen and the various interpretations the afforded depend largely on cultural registers, power relations, and epistemologies that continually shift the white phenotype of Irish people, for example, was all but “invisible” to the white scopic regime of the 19th Century Britain. The racist caricaturing of the Irish that is now so well documented…

Read or purchase the article here.

Afternoon Talk: Dr. Zélie Asava (Free Event)

Irish Film Institute
6 Eustace Street
Temple Bar
Dublin, Ireland

2013-10-11, 16:30 IST (Local Time)

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

In our Afternoon Talk on October 11th (16.30), Dr. Zélie Asava, Programme Director of Video and Film at Dundalk Institute of Technology will discuss aspects of the research in her recently published book The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Irish Identities on Film and TV (Peter Lang, 2013) which is available at the IFI Film Shop.

For more information, click here.

Creative Media lecturer publishes new book

Dundalk Institute of Technology
Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland
2013-09-02

Sarah Mc Cann

Zélie Asava, a lecturer on the BA & BA (Hons) in Video & Film Production has recently had her book—The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television—published by the Peter Lang Publishing Group. 

The book is also the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

The book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation…

Read the entire article here.

Dublin has problems. But I am proud to be part of a growing Irish mixed-race grouping, and to be able to see mixed-race people representing Ireland on the world stage whether it’s the new Rose of Tralee Clare Kambamettu, actresses Ruth Negga and Samantha Mumba, TV presenters Baz Ashmawy and Seán Musanje, or sportsmen such as Stephen Reid, Clinton Morrison, the Ó hAilpín brothers, or the late Darren Sutherland.

Zélie Asava, “the truth about dublin — an unfair city,” The Evening Herald, October 2, 2010. http://www.herald.ie/lifestyle/the-truth-about-dublin-an-unfair-city-27963389.html.