Decolonizing Irishness: Assertions of Afro-Irish Self-Determination in Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley’s Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life

Abstract

Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley's 2008 documentary film Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie's 2018 short-story collection This Hostel Life raise questions about Ireland's postcolonial position on the economic and geographic periphery of Europe amid the added complexity of emerging racial formations. These texts critically depict the racial and cultural barriers that produce a voyeuristic bifurcation between an implied white Irish citizen and a racialized non-citizen. Seaview invokes this voyeuristic bifurcation to critique the segregation and isolation of asylum seekers detained in Direct Provision (DP) centres from the rest of Irish society. Yet moments of ambiguity in filmic strategies of who is looking and who is seen emphasize ongoing colonial and neocolonial histories that continue to impact identity formations in Ireland. The possibilities and limitations of representing Afro-Irish self-determination arises as a site of contestation in Okorie's 2018 collection of three stories This Hostel Life. The second short story, “Under the Awning,” is a frame narrative that reclaims the liminal elements of second-person narration to assert emerging forms of Afro-Irish self-determination. This story exposes layers of racialization as it also indicates multiple possible voices materializing across multiple possible Irelands. In the seemingly disparate genres and media of documentary film and the short story, Seaview and This Hostel Life structurally challenge Irish racial formations that conform to a default colonial white norm. Reading these texts together exposes connections between postcolonial national identity and colonial racial formations that postcolonial nations willingly or unwillingly inherit through globalized economies and internationally integrated immigration reforms. By critically challenging racializing contexts and narratives during and after the Celtic Tiger, Seaview and This Hostel Life expand the representational possibilities for Afro-Irish self-determination in twenty-first century Irish literature and film.

Keywords:

• Afro-Irish self-determination
• antiblackness
• identity formations
• Ireland
• Irishness
• racial hierarchies

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society for their generous support of my research during the 2020–21 academic year. I would also like to thank Still Films and Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley for granting me permission to use images from Seaview to illustrate my analyses. I also greatly appreciate the helpful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Land reform policies after the Famine of the late 1840s and economic policies after T. K. Whitaker’s white paper in 1958 financially supported emigration out of Ireland. See, for example, Breathnach (2005, 129) on the 1882 Arrears Act and Crotty (2002, 4) on Irish education reforms of the 1980s, which emphasized technology skills in demand by companies outside of Ireland. Irish people of colour were consequently often part of emigrant communities living, at times, outside Ireland, with Phil Lynott being a notable example.

2 My reference to the terms Black, anti-Black, and antiblackness conforms to Dumas’s (2016, 12–13) definitions of these terms, where “Black is understood as a self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships.” By contrast, “blackness and antiblackness […] refer not to Black people per se, but to a social construction of racial meaning, much as whiteness does” (13).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society.