Black History Month Library Guide

ABSTRACT
Whether we perceive the process of food leaving its mark on our culture as a function of genetic or collective memory, or a combination, informs the ways we interrogate the continued existence of these foods and their practices across time and landscapes. Within the postcolonial context, the process of re-embodiment is an inherently bittersweet one in that it comes as a consequence of loss and rupture and is motivated by a desire to be remade. Prior to colonialism, the production of alcohol was a profound aspect of the lives of the many peoples of West and West-Central Africa. Descendants of trafficked Africans in Trinidad reproduced this practice of distilling non-mainstream alcohol in the form of an overproof spirit called babash. The skilful and sustained brewing of this spirit for over two hundred years was directly possible due to the veritable isolation in which the Merikins existed for a large part of their history in Trinidad. The geographic location of the Merikins “produced an optimum environment,” where, in the “absence of constant oversight, they were able to forge the continuance of indigenous practices and cultural traditions. Enabling them to construct a new identity as a result and in spite of tragic conditions (Fuller 2015, 2). The drive to remake oneself within a new context while retaining as much as possible of the elements of the identity of the old context is constant in displaced persons. It requires the reshaping of substitutes, inputting these into lingering structures, to facilitate the recreation of customs in a new world. To that end, traces of old forms are and always will be innately located within the new.

ABSTRACT
The Exodus of the Israelites has long held meaning for African American Christians, as noted by scholars of African American religious history. Jewish studies scholars, meanwhile, have written about both Passover and Jewish relationships to the Exodus. Michael Twitty, public historian, James Beard award-winning author, and memoirist, has fused an identity for himself by drawing on the foodways of both traditions to remember and memorialize the trauma of both traditions While Twitty uses food to create meaning in the context of holidays, his memoirs, Kosher Soul and The Cooking Gene, explore how the food of trauma, poverty, and resilience provide link his African American and Jewish identities. Twitty focuses on the food that both traditions create out of poverty, writing about “struggle meals” such as gefilte fish and gumbo, an African American delicacy made out of scraps from the enslaver’s table. In merging his Jewish practice and Black heritage, Twitty creates a ritual container which acknowledges that, just as displacement echoes through Jewish experience, enslavement echoes through Black experience, and those experiences of trauma and resilience shape the present. Twitty provides African American Jews the religious support for living with racism that African American Christianity has historically provided, while grounding that experience in Judaism. By looking at how he does this in the context of both holidays and daily life, I will discuss his reshaping of Jewish temporal practice to meet the needs of Jews with diverse histories and his ability to create forward-looking foodways out of histories of trauma.

ABSTRACT
This study examines Black Minority Ethnic social care students’ experiences in Ireland and is located within the parameters of a number of key global events that occurred in the last decade. It provides critical insights into the students lived experiences of migration, resettlement, employment, higher education and social care scholarship.

Theoretically the thesis is grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) drawing on the key tenets of race as a social construction, interest convergence, White privilege, storytelling and intersectionality. A participatory research methodology was adopted which informed all phases of the study. Using a combined semi-structured interview/storytelling method the experiences of 21 female Black Minority Ethnic social care students in five colleges in Ireland were explored and core themes of loss, fear, distrust and adaptions were identified.

By hearing, amplifying and sharing the experiences and voices of these participants, the research highlights the intersectional and cumulative impact of structural, institutional, systemic and personal racism and oppression in Ireland. The discussion considers the core themes of loss, fear and distrust and assesses the implications for Black Minority Ethnic social care students living, working and studying in Ireland.

The lessons learned provide the basis for recommendations targeted at wider society, higher education and social care scholarship and signpost considerations for future research. A key action stemming from the study is the development of the Race Equity Informed Common Space community of practice currently piloted in TU Dublin. This action, based on collaboration and participation, will advance some of the lessons learned from the research.

ABSTRACT
Scholars over the years have delved into the discourse of states’ foreign publics engagement in achieving their foreign policy objectives. This analysis is done generally with the western perspective of public diplomacy with recent Asian scholarship evolving. As a result, this study aims to reflect on public diplomacy from an African perspective. Therefore, it analyses how African governments have engaged their foreign publics (foreign governments and their citizens) to attract foreign aid, tourism, and investments in their nation-building and development trajectory. The article explores African public diplomacy mechanisms such as diasporas, nation branding, cultural diplomacy, and many others. It also digests into some challenges confronting African governments in their public diplomacy campaigns, like lack of research, human and financial resources, and coherent foreign policy documents. The article’s findings demonstrate that although Africa generally has rich public diplomacy resources, these are not adequately harnessed in most African states’ foreign policy. This situation has led to poor foreign policy implementation by most African governments. The study contributes to public diplomacy scholarship in general and African public diplomacy in particular, which scholars have underexplored. It concludes that scholars should delve into the exegesis of the rich African public diplomacy currencies.

ABSTACT
Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical prism, this study interrogates the sense of belonging and inclusion experienced by Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students on one higher education campus in Ireland. The most important story told within the study is as simple as it is complicated. The simple part is that the BME students felt that the campus was inclusive and that they experienced a sense of belonging. The complicated part is that the findings are premised in a normative assumption of whiteness as evidenced by numerous and incremental moments of exclusion in the daily experience of microaggressions, the mispronunciation of name, curriculum and pedagogical exclusions. The article uses this case to reflect on how the higher education experience can be made more inclusive by developing a race consciousness to embrace campus diversity, minimise microaggressions and create inclusive learning environments. Suggestions for inclusive practice are considered in the conclusion.

ABSTRACT
A safari is usually defined as an expedition to hunt, or observe animals in their natural habitat. This paper’s aim is to explore what food was eaten on African safaris, focusing on the nineteenth-century and then the first half of the twentieth. Safari guides began taking rich British and American tourists on expeditions from the early 1900s. The hunting and display of wild animals were intimately associated with the ideologies of Empire and with Muscular Christian Masculinity. Large numbers of animals were slaughtered as trophies and their carcasses provided ‘chop’ for the hunters and the African porters. The ‘deliciousness’ – or otherwise – of various meats is discussed, for example, the taste of various cuts of elephant. While the male hunters’ motivation was often to provide meat for consumption, in contrast, Mary Kingsley, on her journeys in West Africa, procured food supplies from local colonial outposts and, for instance, enthused about a tin of herring while climbing Mount Cameroon. In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway continued in typical great white hunter tradition and recounts cooking Grant gazelle tenderloin on sticks around the camp fire. While game meat is the main focus of meals, other foods were sometimes consumed.

ABSTACT
The Black Lives Matter movement has placed a spotlight on racism, not just as a global phenomenon but as a feature of Irish society. Research conducted with Community Development and Youth Work students on the TU Dublin Blanchardstown campus found that some had encountered racism on placement and felt ill-equipped to deal with it. As a group of white lecturers working with diverse students, we sought and received funding to conduct a project during the academic year 2020/21 which aimed to embed anti-racism in the teaching, learning and assessment of that programme. An action-research methodology using a mixed-methods approach was employed, and focus groups, surveys and reflections were used to gather the evidence base. Following an overview of the theoretical framework underpinning the work, this article charts the journey to achieve the proposed objectives: namely, to change the programme content/delivery, to increase the racial literacy and reflective practice of lecturers in terms of anti-racism, and to enable students to identify racism and empower them to respond to it. The article concludes with an analysis of some lessons learned and emerging issues from the ongoing work.

ABSTRACT
In 2008, the hugely popular American global television format programme, The Apprentice, debuted its Africa wide version, The Apprentice Africa, in the African market. This became the first entrepreneurship format programme to be produced in Nigeria and Africa. First, the show was broadcast on three Nigerian channels, then moved to broadcasters in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Apprentice Africa reality TV show is a strategic research site for investigating the conditions of television format production in Nigeria, considering the programme’s interaction with multiple economic sectors of the country.

This study is set against the backdrop of the organizational conditions of the Nigerian media industry and how they potentially relate to the historical dynamics of nation-building. Thus, it navigates the development of the entertainment industry amid a history of interactions of political, socioeconomic, and cultural factors. Its literature opens with an appraisal of globalisation, broadly explaining how chains of global and local activities converge and interact to result in international trade and adaptation. The literature then tapers into informalization, exposing how local and global media industries function within shadow economies. Accordingly, the literature introduces television (TV) formats. TV formats exemplify and validate the potential for cultural formations or adaptations to be, on the one hand, ‘streamlined or standardized in nature’, as in global media industries, and on the other hand, partly standardized, as in the Nigerian national media industry.

The Apprentice Africa TV format represents an example of a good product of a system that production practices embedded in a culture of informality accomplished. In analysing this adapted format, I argue that cultural innovation benefits an informalized production ecosystem. Bourdieu’s conceptual model of cultural forms describes and explores how television format adaptation is affected by these broader Nigerian media cultures and dynamics. A methodology involving an Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) which features observation and documentary analysis provides a fundamental examination and interpretation method in examining the production and dissemination of this case study format. Furthermore, ECA offers the opportunity to uncover new patterns, emphasis and themes in the documents conceptualised as field work.

In its contribution to knowledge, the study first reveals informal practices as overlooked opportunities for innovation of culture in media fields such as adaptation and production of TV formats. Second, it reveals that the Nigerian media’s structural flexibility increases innovative possibilities. Thus, evidence shows a thriving intersection of the country’s film and television industry’s agents and agencies. Consequently, perfectly licit commodities such as television formats may originate from either irregular or unregulated production arrangements where there are significant cultural influences and changes. Third, the study also showed that Nigeria’s socio-political and organizational history has implications for informalization of its media. Finally, an underlying factor both influenced by informalized culture and partly contributing to it is the country’s hustle culture – in Nigeria, you must hustle to succeed in the business scenes. The implication is that the culture of informalization prevalent in the media industry influences global format adaptation in the country, differentiating its production processes from globally understood and standard processes.

ABSTRACT
There is an expanding shift in the academy to pedagogical developments that aim to address the shortage of custodians of knowledge from Black and ethnic minorities as a contributing factor in sustaining systemic racism and stereotypes in higher education. Further to this, Appleton states that decolonising will only take place and be successful if there are real structural changes in the module, programme, inside the classroom and across the university to create equity and fairness of experience and outcome for every student irrespective of their background. Building MultiStories is constructed as a process whereby staff and students, together, work to identify changes to their curricula, to resources and to assessments that consider alternative epistemologies. The initial pilot took the approach of embedding information literacy teaching from the library services into a business module, 'Diversity in the Workplace’, to develop the skillset of the students, to search for, discover, and critically analyse resources through the lens of diversification. This enabled them to interact with potentially new materials and knowledges and to reflect on this. A ‘Discover Diversity’ library collection, will be further expanded based on the students' recommendations.

ABSTRACT
Mansour Ciss Kanakassy (b. 1957) is a Berlin-based Senegalese artist whose practice addresses the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Africa, in particular as it is expressed in the financial systems of the former Francophone colonies of West Africa, where the currency, the CFA franc, historically tied to the French franc, is now pegged to the euro. The acronym CFA originally stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique – French Colonies of Africa – and now Communauté Financière Africaine – African Financial Community. In 2001, Ciss Kanakassy created the Laboratoire Déberlinisation (Déberlinisation Laboratory), a multifaceted project that traces contemporary African issues to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which divided Africa among the great powers of Europe. The project, which includes the creation and circulation of a pan-African currency, the AFRO, and an international travel document, the Global Pass, has been extensively exhibited throughout Africa and Europe, and in China. In this interview, we discuss the origins of the Laboratoire Déberlinisation and the role of the AFRO in understanding the financial entanglements of neocolonialism.

ABSTRACT
This article examines deprivedmale migrants’ conceptions and performative expressions of hegemonic masculinity in Ireland.It explores their widespread propensity to develop hypermasculine self-images based on ideals of cultural loyalty and economic prosperity that are, in fact, compensatory for their sense of emasculation, marginalization and social failure as a result of economic difficulties within their host societies.The first section surveys perceptions and preconceptions about migrant men and young male immigrants in a variety of Irish media, political and social discourses. The second section considers recent research and the development of theoretical perspectives about migrant masculinity in Ireland. In the third section, it is argued that these broad discourses and preconceptions are accentuated and encapsulated in a corpus of Irish theatre and film productions, such as Jimmy Murphy’s play about Irish emigrants in London,The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2001), which was subsequently adapted by Tom Collins in the Irish language film Kings (2007). Bisi Adigun’s Arambe Productions has appropriated and complicated the Kings of the Kilburn High Road storyline in turn. Adigun reenacted the play withWest African immigrants rather than Irish emigrants in London (2006). He subsequently adapted its storyline to a contemporary London setting in Home, Sweet Home (performed in Lagos, 2010), and then he reset the play in Dublin with an African-Irish immigrant cast in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013). In these different versions of the Kings plotline, ideals of migrant masculinity, the image of the “alien” and the meaning of the play/film perceptibly shift depending on whether it is performed by an English-speaking Irish cast, a cast of Irish-language speakers, or an African immigrant cast in Arambe’s productions. Yet, together, these works suggest that immigrants to Ireland and returning Irish emigrants, as well as marginalized Gaelic speakers, face similar gender specific constraints in achieving recognition and gaining acceptance in modern Irish society. Each version is based on competing conceptions and performances of hegemonic masculinity that come into conflict at the culmination of the plot’s development. Both on stage and on screen, they give expression to migrant masculine ideals in Ireland that are defined by wider political and social tensions which they seek to resolve in their respective performances.

ABSTRACT
The narrative of jazz performance in Ireland is unique due to the political changes that coincided with the arrival of jazz and the influence these changes had on the nation. Over the last one hundred years, jazz performance in Dublin has represented contrasting values for different people. What has remained consistent is the notion of participation within a network of musicians, audience members, promotors and institutions that make up a scene. To participate in a scene is to be actively involved in contestation and negotiation as individuals and groups seek to create meaning and identity through jazz performance. In this thesis I examine both the development of the Dublin jazz scene and how meaning and identity is created through participation in it. It addresses an absence of scholarly work on jazz in Ireland beyond the anti-jazz movement of the 1920s, revealing an active community of jazz participants from the 1940s through to present times. It also addresses an imbalance of many jazz studies that focus only on ‘top-level’ performers, disregarding the complex interrelationships between not only musicians of all levels, but of the experience of audience members, journalists, promoters and others who participate in the performance of jazz.

This dissertation first conducts an historical overview of the Dublin jazz scene using primarily archival research. It then uses ethnographic methods to investigate and analyse the scene through its musicians, venues, educational institutions, audiences, promotional bodies and record labels. It argues that the day-to-day activities of jazz musicians, including those outside what has been traditionally viewed as ‘jazz’, should be taken into account when attempting to fully understand jazz performance. This dissertation highlights the long history of jazz performance in Dublin and gives voice to the participants within the scene and places those voices within the context of wider issues in jazz studies.

ABSTRACT
This paper examines the relationship between language and diaspora by trying to look beyond the question of what befalls native tongues in the countries of arrival. The experience of forced migration undergone by African people brought to the Americas might have dispossessed them from their ancestral tongues, but it did not prevent them from aspiring to use language, be it the language of the former slave owner, to express their identity and shared historical experience. Using the example of American poet Langston Hughes and his Cuban peer Nicolás Guillén, this article will highlight the way poets from the African diaspora have influenced and translated each other as a way of bridging the linguistic and cultural gap brought about by history. The literature of the diaspora might well lie in that very rift, which calls for continued translation and rewriting of each other.

ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s Ireland has rapidly changed into a multicultural society and the migrant population is increasingly becoming a well-established part of modern Ireland. This article is linked to one of the conference themes, 'literature as multicultural criticism', and is a contribution to the wider debates in the Irish media and academic circles on multiculturalism and cultural diversity in Ireland. From the beginning of the new millennium, these topics have started to have an impact on Irish literature. The article discusses a small number of Irish literary texts (by Hugo Hamilton, Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, published between 2001 and 2007), which explore, articulate and reflect the development of Ireland into a multicultural society and its associated challenges. Irish identities, as represented in these stories, are in a process of significant change, with the concept of ‘Irishness’ becoming increasingly diffuse.

ABSTRACT
The Algerian War (1954-1962) was arguably the most traumatic war of decolonisation fought by Western colonial powers. As the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence approaches, this “War Without a Name” remains a problematic subject in France, in which the commemoration of the war, the teaching of colonial history and issues associated with North African immigration and French identity, are hotly contested subjects. An especially neglected aspect of the Algerian war has been the one million French of Algeria, now known as Pieds-noirs, who fled to France near the end of the conflict. As a symbol of a failed colonial system, they were a group few were anxious to remember. This paper will examine the activism of Pied- noir women in a significant way: writing and publishing their memories of colonial Algeria to prevent their story from being forgotten. Moreover, it will study the active participation of a Pied-noir woman, Micheline Susini, in the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrete), a terrorist group opposing Algerian independence. This paper will also outline the active role of Muslim women in the war, which was subsequently denied or marginalised by historians in Algeria, as women were encouraged to return to the domestic sphere. Like Pied-noir women, Muslim women have tried to make their voices heard through writing. This paper will refer to Djamila Amrane’s account of the role Muslim women played in obtaining independence and suggest that they later found themselves constrained in the role of keepers of traditional Algerian identity. This paper will question whether traditional gender roles took on exaggerated significance in the colonial situation, not just for the colonised populations, but also for the Pieds-noirs.

ABSTRACT
When a discussion about whitewashing arises, there are often claims that “blackwashing,” the practice of replacing a traditionally White character or role with a Black actor, is the same issue. Much is known about whitewashing and how damaging it is to represent People of Color in film with White actors, however, blackwashing is a recent term to describe what is more often called “colorblind casting.” This study aims to dissect how whitewashing and blackwashing differ, as well as discuss how blackwashing succumbs to the racist history of the Hollywood film industry despite its attempt at leading a brighter future for Black representation in film. Whitewashing will be viewed as direct racism, or the act of treating people differently in a way that promotes unequal opportunities. Blackwashing will be viewed as an attempt at direct anti-racism or the act of promoting equal treatment that results in equal opportunities. However, through the effects of intertextuality, or ascribing meanings from one image onto another, blackwashed characters become a blank slate for the audience to attribute negative Black stereotypes to.