Mixed Race Studies

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.

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.