1. How the Irish became more than white: mixed-race Irishness in historical and contemporary contexts.
- Author
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King-O'Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko
- Subjects
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MULTIRACIALITY , *MULTIRACIAL people , *SOCIAL conditions of ethnic groups ,RACE relations in Great Britain ,RACE relations in the United States - Abstract
Mixed-race people can be caught in a web of stereotypes – being pathologised as tragically 'mixed up' or heralded as the precursors of a 'rainbow nation'. Many of these stereotypes have come primarily from research and popular cultural images in the US and the UK. Recently, within Critical Mixed-Race Studies, there is a call to study mixed-race people outside of these stereotypes, particularly those living outside the US and UK. Ireland is a unique place to look at mixed-race experiences. As a post-colonial nation within Europe with a strongly racialised past (non-white to white) and a global history of emigration, Ireland is actively grappling with contemporary rapid migration and racial/ethnic change from the 2000s to today and is now possibly becoming less white. This paper examines the historical and contemporary contexts of being mixed-race in Ireland to analyse the potential political and social meanings of mixed-race Irishness today. It begins with a demographic snapshot of racial/ethnic changes in Ireland and examines the role of symbolic representations of mixed-race in Ireland. Through indicative qualitative interviews, it concludes with some tentative ideas about how understandings of mixed-race may be shifting within Ireland today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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