Mixed Race Studies

‘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.

Race, Mixed Race and ‘Race Work’ in Japanese American Beauty Pageants

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-10

Rebecca King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland

Long-standing debates within critical race theory about the efficacy of the concept of ‘race’ have posited the mixed race experience as an illustration of the flexible and multiple nature of this socially constructed concept (Gans 2005). However, mixed race studies (Root 1996; DuBose and Winter 2002) themselves have shown that mixed race does not mean ‘no-race’.  There persists, even in mixed race research, the notion of race as a concept where racial meaning is congealed and tied through its supposed association with the body to biology.  Using ethnographic fieldwork in Japanese American beauty pageants, this paper illustrates that the mixed race body invites us to examine more carefully race work – a concept that I introduce to explain how people exert effort to try to keep their own biological notions of race (typically references to looks or physical appearance) in line with their thinking about culture (i.e. full blooded people of color have culture, whites don’t). I look at multiple levels of social interaction in order to shed light on how race is socially and politically constructed in a world where race has gone underground and is more difficult to detect and trace – a world where there can be “racial intent without race” (Ignatiev 2004).

To read the entire paper, click here.