“The Lost Apostrophe”?: Race, the roots journey and the “Rose of Tralee” pageant

Abstract

Building on recent scholarship on discourses of race in twentieth-century and contemporary Ireland, this article examines the racialised nature of the “roots journey”, in which subjects of Irish descent – typically white Irish Americans – travel back to Ireland to trace their roots. Outlining arguments that have emphasised both the reactionary and radical potential of the practices of genealogy and the search for roots, the article focuses on recent developments in the Rose of Tralee contest, an annual beauty pageant in which women of Irish descent compete for the title “Rose of Tralee”. Noting that three winners since 1998 (and several other competitors since 1994) have been of mixed race ancestry, and emphasising the subsequent roots journeys undertaken by two of these winners to the Philippines and India, respectively, the article questions whether these roots journey, taking non-white subjects of Irish descent out of Ireland rather than into it, may offer the potential of decoupling “Irishness” and “whiteness” in radical new ways.

Keywords:

• Rose of Tralee competition
• roots journey
• genealogy
• whiteness
• race and racialisation
• mixed race Irishness

Notes

1. “Remarks by the President at Irish Celebration in Dublin, Ireland.”

2. Recent books that have addressed these concerns include: Steve Garner’s Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto, 2003), Diane Negra’s edited volume, The Irish In Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), Nini Rodgers’s Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, edited by David Lloyd and Peter O’Neill (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), John Brannigan’s Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Gerardine Meaney’s Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2010), Lauren Onkey’s Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers (Basingstoke: Routledge, 2012), Zélie Asava’s The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), Race and Immigration in the New Ireland, edited by Julieann Veronica Ulin, Heather Edwards and Seán O’Brien (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), Kathleen Gough’s Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories (New York: Routledge, 2013) and my own “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

3. “Components of the Annual Population Change, 1987–2013.”

4. Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, 6.

5. Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change, xv–xvi.

6. Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, 5.

7. Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 1.

8. Negra, “Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics Before and After September 11,” 355.

9. O’Neill, “The Star-Spangled Shamrock,” 118.

10. See Jacobson, Roots Too, 45, 46; and Rains, “Irish Roots,” 133.

11. Greer, “The Ethnic Question,” 119.

12. Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 60.

13. Nash, Of Irish Descent, 8.

14. Ibid., 59.

15. Lloyd, Ireland After History, 102.

16. Jacobson, Roots Too, 21.

17. Ellis, “The Historical Significance of President Kennedy’s Visit to Ireland in June 1963,” 117, 118.

18. Almeida, Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995, 9.

19. Ibid., 9.

20. Greer, “The Ethnic Question,” 120.

21. Ibid., 120.

22. Gibbons, The Quiet Man, 4–5; and Rains, The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 70.

23. Meaney and Robb, “Shooting Ireland,” 134.

24. Zuelow, “An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 1953–1958,” 60.

25. Mulchinock, “The Rose of Tralee.”

26. Byrne, “Introduction,” 4, 5.

27. Dwyer, The Rose of Tralee, 21.

28. Ibid., 31.

29. Viewing figures have, however, declined over the past six years. In 2010, average ratings reached 916,000. In 2016, the figure was 618,000, a fall of 33 per cent from 2010. See Slattery, “Television Viewers”; and Linehan, “Rose of Tralee TV Viewing Figures Hit 10-Year Low.”

30. Younge, Who are we and should it Matter in the 21st Century? 114.

31. Ibid., 114.

32. Collins, “Sydney’s ‘Rose of Tralee’ Shakes Up Irish Pageant with Abortion Rights Speech.”

33. Fintan Walsh, “‘Homelysexuality’ and the Beauty Pageant,” 197.

34. Ibid., 197.

35. On Jones’s paintings, see Martin, “Painting the Irish West”. On the deployment of “the female image of sovereignty” in Irish political writing, see Nic Eoin, “Introduction to Sovereignty and Politics, 1300–1900.” On the “colleen,” see O’Connor, “Colleen’s and Comely Maidens.”

36. Dyer, White, 2.

37. O’Brien, “The Vanishing Irish,” 22.

38. For example, an article in the Irish Independent about the drop in Cape Clear’s population from 619 at the turn of the century to 240 in 1959 called the phenomenon a ‘real-life tragedy of the “Vanishing Irish”’ (“Priest’s Campaign to Keep Islanders from Leaving,” Irish Independent 24 August 1959, 5).

39. Dyer, White, 29.

40. Connolly, “The Commission on Emigration, 1948–1954,” 87.

41. Geary took issue with the book’s claim that if the previous century’s rate of decline continued, the Irish would have virtually disappeared as a nation in another hundred years’ time. Geary found this assertion “fantastically unreal”. He added that O’Brien’s claims were “scientifically invalid” and that, according to the figures available to him, Ireland’s population would, in fact, rise to 5.4 million by 2036. See “Effects of Famine on Growth of Population” and “Irish Current Affairs.”

42. “Population Figures Lowest Yet Recorded,” 1.

43. Daly, “Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics,” 77.

44. Dáil Éireann, 29 February 1956. http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1956022900046?opendocument.

45. Dwyer, The Rose of Tralee, 78.

46. Ibid., 93.

47. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity.

48. Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 125.

49. I discuss the treatment of Belinda Brown, of Irish Jamaican parentage, in “Other People’s Diasporas,” 26.

50. Dwyer, The Rose of Tralee, 88.

51. Nash, Of Irish Descent, 70.

52. Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, 16.

53. Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, 198.

54. Ibid., 194. In 2016, the World Bank changed its designations “developed” and “developing” to “more specific definitions” aimed at “categorising economies which though ‘developing’ in character, differ dramatically from one another”. Under this new rubric, India will now be called “lower-middle income country/South Asia”. Somvanshi, “World Bank to Change Classification of Countries.”

55. There are, of course, other examples besides these two. There is Colum McCann’s Songdogs (1995), in which Mayo-born Conor Lyons retraces his parents’ travels from Mexico, to San Francisco, to Wyoming, in an attempt to discover what became of his Mexican mother, Juanita, after she left him and his father in the 1970s. A further salutary example, which I discuss elsewhere, is Roddy Doyle’s “Home to Harlem” (2004, 2007). See Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas,” 88–98.

56. O’Connor, Belonging, 86.

57. Ibid., 174.

58. Ibid., 202.

59. Kehoe, Walking on Dry Land, 16, 109.

60. Ibid., 223.

61. Ibid., 98.

62. Ibid., 244.