‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema |
‘The Nephew’ and ‘The Front Line’: black and mixed masculinities in Irish Cinema
Old Ireland, New Irish: ‘The same people living in the same place’: American Conference for Irish Studies 2009
‘Into the heartland of the ordinary’: Second Galway Conference of Irish Studies 2009
Hosted by
Centre for Irish Studies
National University of Ireland, Galway
2009-06-10 through 2009-06-13
Zélie Asava
University College Dublin
This paper explores representations of ethnicity and gender in The Nephew and The Front Line, Irish films which feature mixed-race and black male protagonists, and so reflect the changing face of the nation in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as well as reflecting contemporary concerns regarding the histories and transformations of Irish identity and tradition.
Historically the mixed/black body formed a canvas for Western conceptual theories of blackness, as Fanon noted: ‘I am overdetermined from without’.v In the last 20 years mixed/black actors have featured in several Irish films – Pigs, The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Irish Jam, Breakfast on Pluto, Isolation and Boy Eats Girl – as prostitutes, single mothers, rappers and social contaminants. The transnational migratory bodies of The Nephew and The Front Line will be explored as revealing new directions in Irish cinema which attempt to deconstruct the mixed/black body, multiculturalism and the ‘new Irish’.
The discourses of ‘race’ and gender expressed in these two films portray ‘the possibility of a very differenced Ireland in the world’ which Gerardine Meaney observes may reconfigure the field of Irish Studies. They represent and reinvent public and private identities by projecting non-white Irish identity onto an Irish landscape in order to bring this social demographic from the margins to the centre of Irish visual culture.
Tags: Ireland, Zélie Asava