CFP: Africa in Ireland: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

The International Consortium for the Study of Africans in Ireland (ICSAI) invites submissions for papers for an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Africa in Ireland: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives’ at

Queens University Belfast | Northern Ireland 28-9 April 2023

Call for Papers, deadline – 1 February 2023

This conference aims to address the historical presence of Africans and the Black diaspora in the past, present, and future on the island of Ireland. It will critically engage with this presence and the convergences of Irish-African cultural, political and religious relationships and connections. How does the presence of African-descended people in Ireland disrupt the notion of Irish monoraciality? How should we theoretically address issues of race in the defining of Irish national identity in light of historical and contemporary Black Irish identities? What is the nature of the relationship between Africa and the African Diaspora in Ireland? What remains of Ireland’s soft religious colonialism and the mission project? How did Ireland’s postcoloniality align with pre- and post-independence subjugated African nations?

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, North and South, offers great possibilities to study the “complex, variegated, transitional nature of contemporary Irish experience.” However, whiteness is still the vector through which Irishness is determined. In Ireland, which Luke Gibbons so memorably called “a First World country, but with a Third World memory,” the African and Black diaspora are confronted by an essentialist discourse of impassable racial demarcation. Though Ireland has never been monocultural, its predominant monoraciality ensures that Irishness is interpellated as white. The existence of whiteness is, as Connolly & Khaoury have argued, the “constitutive and founding element” of Irishness, and this Irishness is “ethno-racially rigid” . An additional way to explore and explode the monoraciality of Irish society is through history. Very few studies have looked at the presence of Africans and people of mixed heritage in Ireland, the common street view being that this is a phenomenon connected to the Celtic Tiger and/or post-conflict Northern Ireland, and in good part linked to the refugee question. There is little awareness that Ireland was never wholly white. While a few studies have looked at that past, much work remains to be done, a diachronic understanding and chronology need to be established, and implications need to be explored.

It is important to hear African and African-descent voices in this critical examination. In the study of Ireland’s Black identities and diaspora, as is the case in the rest of Europe, it is necessary to make explicit the authentic and historical specificities of their experiences since they serve to elucidate ‘global entanglements and trends by tracing the ways in which they are worked out at the personal and local level.’

We are particularly interested in papers that interrogate the following topics within, or in relation to, the framework of the conference theme:

Black Irish Studies
Africa in Ireland
The relationship between Africa and the African Diaspora in Ireland
Ireland’s soft religious colonialism and the mission project
Ireland’s postcoloniality and alignment with pre- and post-colonial African nations
Notions of Blackness and Africanness
Irishness and Afro-Europeanism
History of African migrations to Ireland pre- and post- Celtic Tiger
The interaction of categories like nation, gender, class, and religion within the category of Africans in Ireland
How Black Irish have conceived themselves historically
Africans in Irish Studies within the larger field of Black Diasporic Culture/Diaspora Studies
Negotiating Black Consciousness in Ireland
Black Cultural Production on the island of Ireland
The relationships of the Black Irish to other ethnic minorities on the island
African students in Ireland
Centring Africa as a decolonised subject for investigation in the Irish curriculum
Please send your abstract of 300 words and a short biographical note to mdoyle@mtsu.edu by 1 February 2023.

Conference Committee: Dr. Mark Doyle, Middle Tennessee State University; Dr. Eric Morier-Genoud, Queen’s University Belfast; Dr. Phil Mullen, Trinity College Dublin; Dr. Nik Ribianszky, Queen’s University Belfast; Dr. Jonathan Wright, Maynooth University

Sponsors:

The School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics (HAPP) at Queen’s University Belfast
The Institute for Irish Studies at QUB
iRise
The Diversity and Inclusion Unit
The Centre for Public History