The Small Press as Cultural Mediator: Narratives of Migration, the Literary Marketplace and Whiteness

This essay investigates Irish literature of contemporary migration in conversation with fictional narratives of migration in European Literature. It will consider how authors Melatu Uche Okorie and Oona Frawley engage with movement from the Global South to the Global North, focusing in particular on migrations from the African continent. The construction of Irish racial whiteness depends on an exclusion of ethnic bodies that do not fit within the idea of nation, as seen with the 2004 citizenship referendum. The essay investigates frames of euro-centric whiteness on migration narratives and outlines the role of the literary marketplace, including the important role of small presses such as Tramp Press and Skein Press, on these texts. The racial identifiers of white Irishness form the inclusion/exclusion binary, meaning non-white, and non-Irish bodies are excluded. This trope is seen in some contemporary Irish migration fiction which, rather than focusing on the stories and agency of their black characters, instead re-centres whiteness. This essay aims to showcase how migration narratives in Ireland, and the global marketplace, can often be framed through a centring of euro-centric whiteness, and how writers maintain or challenge these expectations. Tracing connections between the texts, this essay will identify common tropes and themes of contemporary migration narratives, demonstrating in the process how work published by small presses can counteract these discourses.