The International Consortium for the Study of Africans in Ireland (ICSAI) is organizing an interdisciplinary conference on Africa in Ireland: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives at Queen's University Belfast from April 28th to April 29th.
Conference Information
Africa in Ireland Conference
28-29 April 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." [1] 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,” [2] 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 elements [3] of Irishness, and this Irishness is “ethno-racially rigid” [4].
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.” [5]
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[1] Brown, Terence. 1985. Ireland. A social and cultural history 1922-1985. London: Fontana Press, p. 322.
[2] Gibbons, Luke. 1996. Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork University Press, p. 3.
[3] Connolly, P., & Khaoury, R. 2008. Whiteness, Racism and Exclusion: A Critical Race Perspective. In C. Coulter & M. Murray (Eds.), Northern Ireland After the Troubles: A Society in Transition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 208.
[4] Lentin, R, & Moreo, E. 2015. Migrant deportability: Israel and Ireland as case studies. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 386, 884–910.
[5] Aitken, Robbie, & Rosenhaft, Eve. 2013. Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 3
Conference Interests
The conference is particularly interested in the following topics
- 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
PROGRAMME OF EVENTS
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28 April
Time Event Location 8:30am-09:00am Registration, coffee Senate Room, Lanyon Building 9:00am-10:00am Keynote Lecture: "Challenges and Opportunities for African Students in Irish Higher Education"
Salome Mbugua, Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission
Senate Room, Lanyon Building 10:15am-11:45am Panel 1: Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Africans and Race
Chair: Maurice Casey, QUB
Jack Crangle, Maynooth University, “‘No Race Hate Here’? Black Migrants, Racism and Denial in Twentieth-Century Ireland”
Fiona Bateman, University of Galway, “Kidnapped Biafran Children and an Ibo Colony in Ireland (1970-1972)”
Kevin O’Sullivan, University of Galway, “Ireland in the NGO Moment: Aid and the Othering of Africa from Biafra to Live Aid”
Senate Room, Lanyon Building 12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch Senate Room, Lanyon Building 1:00pm-2:30pm Panel 2: People of African Descent in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Chair: Nik Ribianszky, QUB
Jonathan Wright, Maynooth University, “The Case of John Richardson: an Enslaved African in Eighteenth-Century Ulster”
Richard McMahon, Mary Immaculate College Limerick, “Music, History and the Representation of the Experiences of an African American in pre-Famine Ireland”
Mark Doyle, Middle Tennessee State University, “Black Spirituals for Irish Evangelicals: The Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Irish Tours, 1873-6”
Senate Room, Lanyon Building 2:45pm-4:15pm Panel 3: Material and Textual Legacies
Chair: Mark Doyle, Middle Tennessee State University
Olusegun Morakinyo, TCD, QUB, & University of South Africa “African Collections in Museums in Ireland”
Aoife O’Brien and Anthony Haughey, National Museum of Ireland, “African Collections at the National Museum of Ireland: Historical Perspectives and Future Potentials”
Briony Widdis, QUB, “Finding Names: Ireland, Individuals, and the Royal African Company in the UK National Archives”
Senate Room, Lanyon Building 4:30pm-6:00pm Panel 4: Finding Sources, Telling Stories in Ireland, Britain, and America
Chair: Jonathan Wright, Maynooth University
Bill Hart, Ulster University, "Do Black Lives Matter to Irish Historians?"
Simon Newman, University of Glasgow, "Slavery and reparative justice in Britain: historical research and cultural productions."
Nik Ribianszky, QUB, "Some Brief Comments on Transitioning the Hart Data on Africans in Ireland to a Database"
Senate Room, Lanyon Building - 29 April
Time Event Location 8:30am-9:00am Registration, coffee
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
9:00am-10:30am Panel 5: Blackness in Contemporary Ireland
Chair: Mark Doyle, MTSU
Phil Mullen, TCD, “Contested Texts of Shared Blackness: Perceptions of Blackness amongst Africans and Black Mixed Race in Ireland”
Mindi McMann, College of New Jersey, “‘Home is Neither Here Nor There’: the African Diaspora in Contemporary Irish Culture”
Miriam Nyhan Grey, NYU, “Black, Brown and Green Voices: Creating Community”
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
10:45am-12:15pm Panel 6: African Students in Ireland
Chair: Phil Mullen, TCD
Aydin Anil Mucek, UCD, “African Students in Ireland: Irish Racism and Political Agency of African Students in Ireland in the 1960s”
Gabriel Opare, TCD, “What Happened to the Nigerian Doctors Trinity College Trained in the Last Century?”
Eric Morier-Genoud, QUB, “Africans at Queen’s University Belfast: a history”
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
1:30pm-3:00pm Roundtable: Africans in Irish Higher Education
Moderator: Nik Ribianszky, QUB
Irenitemi Abolade, TUD
Dr. Sister Felicity Kalu, QUB
Asha Larson-Baldwin, QUB
Jamie Lukas Campbell, QUB
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
3:30pm-4:30pm Closing Address
Hakim Adi, University of Chichester
Old Staff Common Room, Lanyon Building
4:30pm-5:30pm Cultural Event: History of Africans in Northern Ireland
Chairs: Henri Mohamed and Eric Morier-Genoud, QUB
Contacts
For general conference inquiries, contact Dr Nik Ribianszky (n.ribianszky@qub.ac.uk) or Dr Eric Morier-Genoud (e.morier-genoud@qub.ac.uk).
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
This conference is supported by the School of HAPP, the Institute of Irish Studies, the Centre for Public History, iRISE, African & Caribbean Support Northern Ireland (ACSONI), and the Diversity and Inclusion Unit at Queen's University Belfast.
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