An IASH work-in-progress seminar, delivered by Dr Chanté Mouton Kinyon (Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, 2025)
The Transatlantic Gesture: the Irish and Black Cultural Exchange
My work-in-progress presentation focuses on one chapter of the book project that I am working on during my IASH fellowship. My book project, The Transatlantic Gesture: the Irish and Black Cultural Exchange, studies the work of Irish and African American artists—in this case, of the twentieth century—in order to understand the connections these artists made to each other (and in opposition to how Irish Americans used whiteness against Black Americans). The Transatlantic Gesture examines the continuous intersections and comparisons of those of the Black and Green Atlantics to explain how these interactions created intimate bonds between Black and Irish artists and activists, resulting in these artists signaling to each other in their work. Starting with the Harlem Renaissance and ending with the postcolonial turn in Irish Studies, The Transatlantic Gesturefocuses on the work of twentieth century writers, filmmakers, and playwrights who gesture across racial and national lines in their various projects in an attempt to signify an understanding of shared racialization amongst the Irish and those of African descent.
In this chapter, I consider the work of Irish writer Roddy Doyle (b. 1958) author of The Commitments (1987), The Deportees and Other Stories (2007), and numerous other works, including Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (1991) for which he won the Booker Prize (1993). This chapter considers how Doyle uses Black American ideologies in his oeuvre to shape definitions of Irishness; with a goal of explaining what it means to frame Ireland within a Black American context.
In Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte declares “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.” It continues: They nearly gasped: it was so true. —An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’ everythin’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin—Say it loud, I’m Black an’ I’m proud (9). Doyle points out in the foreword of The Deportees and Other Stories that the shift of the (white) Irish as the marginalized Other to inhabitants of “one of the wealthiest countries in Europe” also shifted how white Irish people thought of themselves. He states that while he wrote in 1987 that “The Irish are the niggers of Europe. Twenty years on there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland, and if I was writing that book today, I wouldn’t write that line” (xii).
While in 2007, Doyle disavows the way that he aligned Irishness and blackness in The Commitments, I still find that he uses Black American identity to define the new Ireland much in the same way that he used blackness to define Ireland in the twentieth century. In The Deportees and Other Stories, blackness in Ireland is no longer a cheeky metaphoric alignment to Irishness but physically embodied by the number of African immigrants living and working in the country and also by the mixed-race children of these immigrants and white Irish people. The shift impacts how the white Irish see themselves and their ethnic identity. Today’s Ireland can no longer claim to be white, settled, and Catholic (though it never really could) and Doyle’s writing in The Deportees reflects this shift. Yet in doing so, Doyle’s work in the short story collection also reveals that the writer continues to identify Irishness through an African American lens. White Irishness and now Black Irishness as well, is articulated through an African American historiography.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7