The next meeting of the bi-monthly Carantes Reading group will be held online on Zoom, on Monday February 24^th at 7-9pm GMT/UK Time. E-mail in if you’d like to attend – all are welcome!

The readings are two freely available articles on race and modern Celticity, written by the leading Welsh-Jamaican and Welsh-Guyanese scholars Hazel Carby and Charlotte Williams. Topics include relations between African Americans and Irish Americans, essentialist Celticism within modern Welsh multiculturalism, Afro-Celtic identities, and the fascist aesthetics of Riverdance(!). The readings are listed below:

Hazel V. Carby (2001), ‘What is this ‘black’ in Irish popular culture?’, in European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.3: 325-349. [If you have no institutional access to this journal, please email for a free pdf copy, kindly provided by Prof. Carby]

Charlotte Williams (2004), ‘Can We Live Together?: Wales and the Multicultural Question’, in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 11: 216–230.

CONTENT NOTE: these articles contain unexpurgated racial slurs and some descriptions of racialised violence. In discussing them, we will establish as ground-rules that speaking such slurs aloud is not acceptable, and that debate should foreground the needs of minoritised participants. For a more recent treatment of some Irish appropriations of Black identity covered by Carby, see here.

We can also announce the text for our subsequent meeting, to be held in April. We will be reading Patrick R. O’Malley’s The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (2023). This book is not freely available, so we’re letting you know in advance in case you can order it to your local/institutional library.

We look forward to seeing you soon! Rhys & Elisabeth (co-organisers).