Racialised from the past: Irish genealogies of slavery in the Caribbean

The 2004 Citizenship referendum is a telling index of the nation's sentiment about who is entitled to be Irish. Whether newly arrived or born here Black inhabitants are refused the right to call Ireland home. The exclusion of blackness from constructions of Irishness is strikingly reminiscent of the absence or erasure of black people from Irish diasporic history, particularly in the Americas. This article examines Irish involvement in Caribbean slavery and argues that the slow violence of colonial ideologies of race and race-making contributes to epistemologies of ‘race’ and the exclusion of Blackness from Irish diasporic identity and contemporary national belonging. Irish historiography rarely acknowledges the overlapping processes of Irish migration whitening strategies and African slavery. My inquiry focuses on the connected lives of Irish and African descended women in the Spanish colony of Cuba. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship of slavery, race and gender and reading across the myriad relations between people from Europe and Africa in the Caribbean, this article demonstrates the omission of diasporic complicity in slavery from Irish historiography and in doing so challenges the epistemic erasure of Black people in Irish academic knowledge production.