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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

In this re-examination of what were profoundly racialised discourses surrounding the 2004 citizenship referendum, the present volume presents a welcome opportunity to explore articulations of Irishness that centre on race, ethnicity, citizenship rights and the nation. The 2004 plebiscite copper fastened the passage of citizenship rights from jus solis to jus sanguinis the result of which Ronit Lentin argues was the culmination of state racism in Ireland. The citizenship referendum succeeded in excluding women of African or Majority world origin from becoming biological or cultural producers of the nation (Lentin, 2007). In the lead up to the referendum, the fear of reproducing black Irishness was configured in the potential of African or black women giving birth to Irish citizens and became, as Ní Lubhéid argues, a code for unsanctioned racism and racial thinking (Ní Lubhéid, 2003, 832). In the hierarchy of genders, personal freedom and reproductive rights have long been a struggle for women in Ireland. In addition, the underlying assumption of a natural and gendered boundary of Irishness worked to exclude mothers of colour and their children. The 2004 plebiscite is a telling index of the nation's sentiment about who is entitled to be Irish as evidenced by a lifetime of experiential exclusion from ‘the sense of “becoming” Irish’. Whether newly arrived or born here ‘the right to call Ireland home is not extended to Black inhabitants’ (Mullen, 2024, 18). The exclusion of blackness from constructions of Irishness conceptualised by Mullen (2024, 2025) is historically rooted and can be traced to the absence or erasure of black people from Irish historiography and emigration narratives.

In looking to 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 is uncritically reproduced in current racial imaginaries and contributes to epistemologies of ‘race’ and the exclusion of Blackness from Irish diasporic identity. Irish historiography rarely acknowledges racial dynamics and legacies of racism when dealing with Irish migration, ethnic whitening strategies and slavery in the Atlantic world. In the context of Caribbean slave societies, in particular the Spanish colony of Cuba, my inquiry here focuses on the connected lives of women of Irish and of African origins shaped in the violence of transatlantic slavery. Gender, no less than race, must be framed in historical terms to understand the legacies of racial capitalism that structured Atlantic circuits of colonial labour where displaced and dispossessed Irish people circulated in the company of Africans transported and enslaved in their millions to the Americas. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship of slavery, race and gender (Hartman, Spillers, Morgan) and reading across the myriad relations between people from Europe and Africa (Lowe) in the Caribbean, this article situates Irish migration and settlement in the annihilating violence of plantation slavery in colonial Cuba. As I argue here, the historical exclusion of Blackness from Irish and European national belonging is not an aberration, rather it is rooted in the systematic omission of diasporic complicity in Caribbean slavery from our historiography and national identity.

The exclusion of Black people from Irishness and Irish history

The erasures that structure Irish diasporic historiography continue to be reproduced as processes of racial codification, whereby citizenship in post-referendum Ireland remains tethered to whiteness and genealogical purity. Furthermore, the absence of critical engagement with such erasures echoes in contemporary epistemologies of race in which racial myths appear to be transmitted and manifested in the Irish state when taking on the role of protector of racial and cultural identity. Rooted in Enlightenment ideas of white superiority, Irishness is constructed as white and Christian in the wider context of European civilisation. This historically embedded ideology of race, though often framed as a recent phenomenon, has stimulated research on cultural histories of race and the Irish imaginary; ¹ and diasporic histories in relation to the troubling past of Irish entanglements with slavery particularly in the Caribbean. ² Scholarship on the Irish as colonial Other, and ‘becoming white’ within North American structures of race begins to examine the complexities of Irish relations with the African diaspora. ³ Irish historiography including postcolonial Irish Studies has until recently rarely included black people and Irish people of colour in our history at home and abroad. ⁴ Colonial hierarchies of race in the pre-famine era compared the native Irish unfavourably with the Native Americans as more wretched than the noble savage (Gibbons, 1996, 152). Less than a century later on the eve of independence, native peoples were deployed as a touchstone to elevate the Irish among colonised peoples in nationalist polemics. Childers drew on settler colonial beliefs of white superiority denigrating Native Americans as ‘coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic and incapable of fusion with whites […] while in Ireland the native race was white, civilized, Christian’ (1911, 10). The evident ability of the Irish to ‘fuse’ with whiteness, since long before the formation of the nation, served well throughout the history of Atlantic slavery where ‘despite being victims of the first British empire, Irish people enslaved others throughout this period and were at the cutting edge of extractive colonialism’ (O’Kane and O’Neill, 2023, 1).

The imperative to re-examine this history is necessarily an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary endeavour, if we are to determine and understand the intersections between race, slavery, gender and kin associated with Irish settlement in the Hispanic Caribbean. ⁵ Consequently, my analysis engages with Irish, Cuban and Caribbean Studies, with critical analysis drawing on Black Feminist theory, and Black Studies in an Irish context. In her 2024 article positioning Black Studies in the Irish context, Mullen advocates for an ‘exploration of Irish academic knowledge production’ that acknowledges the ‘epistemic erasure and systematic bias that persist with regard to Black people in Ireland’ in what she terms ‘Unexpected Irishness in the form of Black bodies (and knowledges) in imagined white spaces, discourse and episteme’. Indeed, the development of a critical discourse on Irish historical relations with the Black Diaspora in the Americas expands the ground for Black Studies to recover and repair knowledge production by engaging with pressing questions about the past that link colonial capitalism, Irish migration and African slavery. Rethinking these interrelated processes in Irish Studies is crucial to understanding our common diasporic pasts and the continuities that impact on culture and identity today. By placing the 2004 referendum within a transhistorical trajectory shaped by Ireland's Atlantic entanglements, it becomes possible to think about the referendum not as an aberration, but more as a contemporary iteration of racial logics that were incubated in the colonial and diasporic worlds of the past. In this article I will examine processes of erasure of the presence of Black people in Irish migration narratives underlining the lacunae in Irish historiography that lead to an uncritical replication of bias in the production of knowledge about the past.

The paradox of the Irish in the Caribbean

Based on a study of Spanish colonial archives in Cienfuegos and Havana, what emerges is the ‘unexpected’ persistence of Irish surnames across generations of Irish and African descended people in a time when names were a designation of property and ownership by Europeans. Names provide a record of Irish migration but they also provide evidence of a violent marker of the systematic rupture from African kinship once enslaved. They open up multiple histories of Irish slave owners and those they enslaved, erased or submerged in the records of colonial labour and slavery. The retrieval of silenced voices foreclosed from our history of the present allow us to ‘consider this absenting as a critical node’ from which to interrogate the racial hierarchies of the colonial past as residual racisms in the present (Lowe, 2015, 174). In doing so we are confronted with the asymmetric power relations between Irish and African diasporas wrought in the wider history of empire and interrelated processes of transatlantic migration, settler colonialism and slavery.

In my initial research, predicated on questions about Irish migration to Cuba, I began to see evidence of ties between Irish and African diasporas in Cuban plantation slave society. I have written elsewhere about the brutal conditions of peripatetic Irish railroad workers in Havana, the first experiment in ‘free labour’ (Brehony, 2012); the recruitment of Irish settler families to populate ‘white colonies’ set up as buffer zones against slave uprisings (Brehony, 2017); and the positioning of poor Irish immigrants as an ideal cohort to advance colonial strategies of ethnic whitening at a time of escalating slavery in Cuba (Brehony, 2017). Though fewer in number, the records also hold an abundance of evidence of a powerful group of Irish slave owners with substantial land holdings and sizeable sugar and coffee plantations (Brehony and González García, 2024). Between them they enslaved tens of thousands of Africans and their descendants, making Irish surnames such as O’Farrill, O’Reilly, O’Bourke and Kindelan more prevalent among people of African descent in Cuba today. African lives were rendered invisible and their humanity systematically eclipsed in the colonial records by dominant narratives of European elites, in this case, Irish slave owners. My own epistemological ignorance and unanticipated encounter with sources about black Cubans with Irish surnames provoked more composite lines of inquiry and critical engagement with the pitfalls of creating historical narratives from archives rooted in a colonial past.

Since the seventeenth century, Irish exiles and emigrants can be situated in the confluence of ‘peoples from all four quarters of the globe’ who as described by Fernando Ortiz in Cuban Counterpoint (Ortiz, 1995), laboured largely involuntarily in the ‘new world’ to produce tobacco, coffee and sugar for European consumption. Though ‘differentially affected by empire’ (Lowe, 2015, 174) these seemingly disparate peoples share histories of subjection, extermination and removal through foreign occupation of native lands and the brutal commodification of labour sustained by settler colonialism. Nini Rogers points to ‘a changing Irish presence’ in the history of Caribbean Irish connections from indentured servitude ^{6 to wealthy slave owners (Rogers, 2015, 17). In the Hispanic Caribbean, Irish Catholic merchants, military men, and their families profited from patronage by the Spanish Crown and took advantage of the relatively late economic revolution in Cuba, based on sugar and slavery (Brehony, 2012). Such diversity of class complicates the narrative of victims of colonialism with Irish migrants at times able to straddle the divide between colonised and coloniser. This paradox of position in the Caribbean is aptly termed the ‘Irish riddle’ (Donnell, 2015). In the push to decolonise historiography in Caribbean studies, the Irish emerge with a ‘contradictory historical status’ that refuses any one narrative (Donnell et al., 2015). In 1665 the Governor of Barbados (Searle) described Irish servants as a ‘riotous and unruly lot’ who not only resisted their English masters, they occasionally showed solidarity with enslaved people (Beckles, 1990). In contrast, Richard Madden, Dubliner and Superintendent of Liberated Africans in Cuba in 1836 gave a scathing account of his countrymen some of whom were plantation owners. He opined ‘The Irish alas! I have invariably found, who are employed in any shape, are advocates for slavery in all its horrors’ (Madden, Richard, 1849, 165). Irish emigrants were already displaced and dispossessed of their property through the forced destruction of communal systems of agriculture under British colonialism, to be replaced by colonial capitalist systems of large landed properties: the slave plantation system in the Caribbean and the landlord system in Ireland. However, the encounter in the Atlantic world with the African Diaspora propelled an even more inhumane system of dispossession based on racial slavery. In the Hispanic island of Cuba, whether as agents of the Spanish Crown, slave owners or settlers in ‘white colonies’, Irish-African relations forged through violent power relations of Atlantic slavery unfolded along a complex continuum that links colonial racial capitalism, Irish migration and African slavery. The presence of Irish family names such as O’Farrill, O’Reilly, O’Bourke, Wright and Kindelan characterises Ireland's entanglement in the linked worlds of trans-imperial settler colonialism in the Caribbean and the African slave trade in the Atlantic World (Brehony and Finnegan, 2019). 7 The following micro-history of the O’Bourke family in Cienfuegos demonstrates how we are confronted with the presence of people of African descent with Irish surnames. By interrogating the records with Irish surnames, we can begin to understand how African diasporic lineages with Irish surnames emerge in the slave society of colonial Cuba where white people profited economically from the bodies of Africans - women, children and men.}

The O’Bourke women – Irish and African genealogies

Drawing on notary, testamentary and ecclesiastical documents about women bearing for example, the O’Bourke surname we find in the entangled history of that family name from County Limerick an African woman called María Gangá O’Bourke who was captured in Sierra Leone, West Africa and sold into slavery in Cuba. She became the property of Juan O’Bourke, owner of the Nueva Hibernia sugar plantation on the outskirts of Cienfuegos. My search followed the surname as it bifurcates along the colour line with genealogies corresponding to both Irish and African diasporic lineages. The name is assigned in the next generation to Matilde, who inherited slave status from her African-born mother María. In the family of Irish origin, Marina inherits the O’Bourke surname and property in enslaved people from her Limerick-born father Juan O’Bourke. In his last will and testament Juan, a medical doctor from Rathkeale, who died in 1843, leaves his sugar plantation and the enslaved work force of 37 people to his wife and 10 children. ⁸ Almost thirty years later through a public notary document, filed under ‘O’Bourke’ and labelled Libertad we discover a manumission paper stating that Marina O’Bourke, daughter of Irishman John O’Bourke, ‘liberates her slave’.

‘I save and liberate from all captivity and servitude my black criolla, my slave named Maltilde O’Bourke, 25 years of age, and registered in this vicinity. This liberty is for the amount of [1300 escudos] 650 pesos’.

What the document actually tells us is that slave owner Marina O’Bourke permits Matilde to purchase her freedom in 1870 for an agreed sum. Matilde, bought her freedom from slavery eighteen years before abolition in Cuba in 1888. Following the O’Bourke name in the notarial records, Matilde's life as a free woman emerges from different ledgers as a woman of property with a series of mortgage arrangements, evidence of loans and repayments with interest to her former owner, Marina O’Bourke, and a number of Spanish merchants in Cienfuegos. She became a substantial property owner with land, houses and buildings in Cienfuegos and in the nearby railway town of Cruces where she lived until her death at the great age of 87 in 1934.

By cross-referencing the O’Bourke surname with ecclesiastical records, ⁹ we find that before buying her freedom Matilde gave birth to three children who legally became property of Marina O’Bourke. In the convention of nineteenth-century baptism registers, a six-line hand written paragraph describes Matilde as ‘mother of the criolla/o [Maria Elena]; both are property of O’Bourke estate’; the father is described as unknown or padre no conocido. In keeping with the custom of inscribing slavery, the paternal link through patronymic naming conventions is kept from the records, replaced by the ‘property’ owners’ name. As a free woman, Matilde baptised five subsequent children registered under her O’Bourke surname in the records of the Cathedral de Cienfuegos. ¹⁰ Here she records her children's maternal grandmother, María Gangá O’Bourke in the register but not the fathers’ names. Matilde O’Bourke inscribes and marks her Afro-Cuban maternal lineage with a surname designated through Irish slave ownership.

The records of Matilde O’Bourke and her descendants remain scarce to non-existent. Tellingly, the death certificates of Matilde and her daughter, Filomena, exist in the civil register yet there is no memorial or record of their burials in the cemetery of Cruces where they died. The contrast between the material and historiographical remembrance of her former owner, Marina O’Bourke at La Reina cemetery in Cienfuegos is stark consisting of a large tombstone memorialising her life. I knocked on doors in the small railway town of Cruces to ask if anyone remembered Matilde or her descendants only to be consistently assured that the O’Bourkes were white and lived in nearby Cienfuegos. The extant documents about the white family of Limerick origin and their white descendants extend to five generations. ¹¹ However, living descendants tell me they are aware of but have never met the Black O’Bourkes descended from enslaved ancestors. ¹² These and other European surnames provide genealogies of slaveholding families in Cuba and further afield but crucially the erasures and silences which mark African diasporic lineages provide evidence of early iterations of the exclusion and omission of black people from the historiography of Irish diasporas and Atlantic slavery.

Outside of the system of slavery, nineteenth-century Cuba did not outlaw mixed unions but upheld Spanish ideas of limpieza de la sangre or purity of blood. Opposition to mixed-race marriages was officially registered by white families who generally objected to such unions in terms of the ‘absolute inequality’ or the ‘remarkable and transcendental stain’ on their reputation (Martínez-Alier, 1974, 17). In one instance of a bride rejected because her grandmother was African, the parents’ challenged the union on the grounds that ‘[the young man] cannot be allowed to stain the splendour of his family by binding himself to a woman whose origin […] is to be found on the coast of Africa’ (16). Segregated church records or racially marked records were used to alert whites to the ancestry of prospective spouses. In order to police the boundaries of race and secure forever what Zeuske describes as ‘the cultural prison of socially stigmatized blackness’, Cuban Enlightenment intellectual Francisco Arango reassured elites that white blood tarnished by the African race, ‘even though he might be the son or grandson of very commendable people – the concept of one drop of negro blood infecting the white to the most remote member even if our senses and our memory do not discover it – we must recall the testimonial of the dead kept in tradition or parchment covered in dust’ (cited in Zeuske, 2002, 213). In this way, colonial governance reliably policed divisions of humanity by marking and excluding this category of gente de colour from the body politic, designed to ensure the supremacy of the white race. Colonial and church record keeping also facilitated erasure of the violent begetting of children with enslaved women by white men who increased their property and capital from black women's bodies. In the context of Irish entanglements in the Caribbean, these processes and absences have yet to be examined. On closer scrutiny of records in Cuba and beyond, we find the basis for reflection on the policing of the boundaries of body politic based on race, residues of which leak into contemporary ideas of borders of reproduction, belonging and state protection.

‘Kinlessness’ in African genealogies

In order to examine contemporary ‘epistemic erasure and systematic bias that persist with regard to Black people in Ireland’ we can trace earlier instances in colonial epistemes that ignore circumscribed relations in a system that places more value on ties of property than on bonds of kinship. We must first acknowledge genealogies of ‘kinlessness’ in the historical context of slave-ownership in which Irish people participated. This legally enshrined system of kinlessness, as informed by Spillers, is crucial to understanding how slaveholders depended on the dispossession of kin from maternal bodies , a ‘bare genealogy’ of heritable enslavement. Black Feminist scholar, Hortense Spillers, describes the practice of family pedigree as ‘the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic of titles and entitlements of real estate and the prerogatives of cold cash from fathers to sons – and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice – becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and a freed community’ (Spillers, 1987, 74). Such direct family lineages served Irish planters across several generations in the Caribbean where the accumulation of ‘real estate’ from plantation slavery rendered enslaved Africans juridically and socially separated from kin and family networks. It is in ‘the overlap of kinlessness on the requirements of property’ as Spillers explains, that ‘we might enlarge our view of the conditions of slavery’. We can be sure that if kinship were possible for the enslaved ‘property relations would be undermined since the offspring would then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father’ (74). As such, human kinlessness introduced through slavery as an enduring structural condition became an inherited condition for 12 million African captives forcibly transported to the Americas and their descendants born into slavery. Severed from biological, legal and social kinship by African and European traders beginning in the slave ports of West Africa, family relationships were destroyed by separation through sale, rape and violent property relations. The regimes of power operating plantation slavery imposed the condition of kinlessness, as Nancy Bentley argues, ‘to isolate and extract the sheer materiality of a human population – their bodies, labor and reproductive capacities – from the sphere of the familial’ (Bentley, 2009, 271). The legal basis for the inheritance of enslavement throughout the Americas came from the thirteenth-century Castilian Siete Partidas legal code and the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, literally meaning, the child's status at birth followed the womb. The system of Atlantic slavery, as defined by historian Jenifer Morgan, ‘rested upon a notion of heritability’ in which property rights came through African women's bodies. The slaveowners’ ‘future increase’ enshrined in law was materialised through dispossession of kinship rights for African mothers, legally transformed into property rights bestowed upon Europeans. Once in captivity, African women's reproductive capacities were the basis on which racialised slavery developed (Morgan, 2018). Forced African migrations brought many more men than women on slave ships. The logic of slavery made it clear from very early on that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children thus creating ‘a system of alienating the enslaved from their kin and lineage. Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community to justify mass enslavement’ (Morgan, 2018, 1).

In a profound reversal of European notions of heredity, this new legal concept pressed into service notions of difference and bondage based on racial constructs of Blackness. The heritability of freedom through the reproductive bodies of white women marks the difference in these systems of labour in which ‘No white man's child could be enslaved but all black women's issue could’ (Morgan, 2018, 5). This is central to Morgan's argument that ‘enslaved women's maternal possibilities became a crucial vehicle by which racial meaning was concretised’ (2). Hence for Africans and people of African descent, the heritability of enslavement, conceived of as ‘a bare genealogy, the transmission of genetic life alone, kinlessness operates to make the facts of the body serve the socio-political order of the New World slave societies’ (Bentley, 2009, 271).

It was through the gendered legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem that male slave-owners with patriarchal rights over their enslaved women and children ensured that ‘untold sexual encounters’ and rape of their enslaved female property did not undermine their property rights because the resulting children followed the mother's status (Cowling, 2013, 54). Up to the closing decades of the nineteenth century, property rights in people was what Stoler called ‘a built-in and natural product’ (Stoler, 1989, 137) of white European immigration to the Americas. Even for poorer Irish immigrants who never became landowners in Cuba, based on the juridical superiority of racialised whiteness, they were entitled to own enslaved people and profit from generations of ‘kinlessness’ enshrined by the laws of slavery.

Dormant genealogies of Irish slave owners

In a very different process of dispossession, Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in the Caribbean having fled Ireland as colonised subjects of the British crown. Dispossessed of their lands and disenfranchised on religious and ethnic grounds, the wealthier class strategised to assimilate into the Hispano-Cuban slave-owning aristocracy. As an exiled community of old Gaelic land-owning stock, they were from ‘ancient and illustrious families’ where kinship obligations and professional genealogists constituted ‘proof of noble descent’ to enter continental regiments and the highest echelons of Spanish colonial society. This milieu ‘created a market for pedigrees, real or embroidered’ and explains why genealogy was crucial to an ascendant mobility (Whelan, 2015). They joined Spanish imperial armies, or trade and religious missions to the Hispanic Caribbean where Catholicism and whiteness elevated social status from colonial Other in Ireland to colonial elite in Cuba. Once at the heart of Cuban aristocracy, plantation owners of Irish extraction remained loyal to the Spanish crown right up to independence in 1898. Planters consolidated their wealth in the slave economy and Irish creole elites played no small part in embedding property relations that relied on a system of kinlessness and white domination to perpetually subjugate African captives as enslaved property (Brehony, 2012). They were well-positioned to shape the unfolding violence of slavery, executed ‘when economic structures supersede kinship and when enslaveability displaces maternity’ (Morgan, 2018, 2). This is the chasm onto which ‘patronymic titles and entitlements of real estate’ began to mark and claim their ownership of people and land through Atlantic slavery in the Caribbean. Propertied Irish emigrants, just like other European slaveholders, contributed to the formation of early modern ideas of slavery and freedom based on white supremacy and settler colonialism, legacies of which persist in the social inequalities of the present.

The genealogies of large slave holding families such as the O’Farrill and O’Reilly dynasties in Cuba are rooted in Irish nobility. They came to the Caribbean to take advantage of prosperity denied them in Ireland under British colonialism only to become part of the planter class in the Spanish colonial world. These families are described in Cuban historiography as distinguished and illustrious, associated with European liberal Enlightenment ideals of progress, science, and the political economy of sugar and slavery. In fact, the truth of the O’Farrill slave-trading enterprise has until recently remained concealed, buried by distorted accounts of opulence and wealth (Rojas Rodríguez, 2019) in the colonial archive - ‘a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power’ (Stoler, 2002, 97). As we are discovering, the records are not impenetrable and can, if searched beyond a European bias, yield accounts of creole-Irish wealth built on slavery and bolstered by elaborate, meticulously protected networks of kinship. Irish historiography has largely ignored the slave-owning past of these exiled families in Cuba (Montglâne, 1999). The dormant histories of Irish connections to slavery contribute to what Haitian Anthropologist Michel Trouillot has conceived of as ‘silencing the past’ of Caribbean history (Trouillot, 1995). They divert our attention from the violence and unfathomable depths of inhumanity subsumed in genealogies of successive generations who profited from the Cuban slave economy. Yet to fully grasp the links between Irish genealogies and black diasporic lineages in Cuba these histories must touch each other by telling a fuller story of a slave-owning past with attendant narratives of enslavement and violent expropriation.

One of the painful questions that remains is ‘how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as commodities, units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?’ (Hartman, 2008, 3). In this shared history, Hartman listens for the unsaid and pushes the boundaries of the archives to tell the story of ‘the one who haunts the present’. She challenges the pledge of history ‘to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror’ (9). And to the silences in the archive, Hartman says ‘Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive’ (4). In response to Hartman's call, it is possible to summon life stories and meaning from the thousands of records in Cuban or any archives bearing Irish names long since confined to selected narratives and amnesia – narratives, as Lowe argues, that emerge from colonial divisions of humanity and ‘the management of labor, reproduction, and social space’ (Lowe, 2015, 8). In the context of plantation slavery, mixing and intimate contact occurred across race and class but crucially it was through women's bodies ‘that the violence of physical and cultural intermixture occurred’ (Cowling, 2013, 5). Hence, by reading into imperial archival technologies of obfuscation we can begin to reconstruct the difficult truth and dialogue with the past.

Colonial archives

The Archivo Nacional de la Republica de Cuba (ANC) was built in 1844 on a plot of land where over a century earlier Ricardo O’Farrill, Montserratian of Irish parentage from Longford, located his warehouse near the port and slave market in Havana. From here he bought and sold African men, women and children in their tens of thousands. A palimpsest of place and manuscript the ANC, as ‘the supreme technology of Empire’ in Stoler's terms, created order for Spanish colonial memory and that of Atlantic slavery (2002, 97). The power and status of the archive ‘encompasses the physical space of the site of the building […] the organisation of the “files”, […] that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity, that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery […] a cemetery in the sense that fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics’ (Mbembe, 2002, 19). Much of the colonial archive is founded on violence; the same violence that ‘determines, regulates and organises statements about what can be said about slavery’ (Hartman, 2008, 10). Mindful of the limits of archives distorted by protocols of colonial administration and power, by situating Irish settlers in the ‘annihilating violence’ of the plantation system, we begin to understand the coloniality associated with Irish surnames. Consequently, historiographical engagement with the history of Black diasporic lives serves to expand and unsettle the genealogical scope of Irish nomenclature in the context of slavery and migration in the Americas. In addition, we can see how a critical reading of the Irish presence, when it ‘mines the figurative dimensions of history and labours to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible’ (11), not only engages with Black diasporic narratives but crucially for this inquiry, it provides us with a fuller understanding of our connected histories in the Caribbean.

As this research demonstrates, effacements and evasions enter the historical narrative when first created by colonial functionaries with the power to decide what to leave in and what to leave out of the records. Trouillot argues that ‘History is the fruit of power’ out of which narratives produced from these sources by historians in different times reflect decisions on what to highlight and what to ignore (Trouillot, 1995). The process of history-making tied to colonial archives has reproduced narratives in which ‘racial classifications and colonial divisions of humanity are naturalised’ (Lowe, 2015, 41). As to the present Lowe continues ‘we see the longevity of the colonial divisions of humanity in our contemporary moment, in which the human life of citizens protected by the state is bound to the denigration of populations cast in violation of human life set outside of human society’ (6). Such divisions and the long slow violence of racialisation and racism reproduced by historiography are central to cultural formations of what Hartman has termed ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (2008). If we are to transform the scope of existing historiography and historical erasure then we must adopt ‘a different kind of thinking’ one that opens ‘a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, […] that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science, and also the matters absent, entangled and left unavailable by its methods’ from which ‘reckon[ing] with the violence of affirmation and forgetting, in order to recognize that this particular violence continues to be reproduced in liberal humanist institutions, discourses and practices today’ (Lowe, 2015, 41). Reckoning with the presence of Black people absent from Irish history is long overdue as a corrective to epistemic violence of socially embedded racism resonant of settler colonial ideologies of race in the construction of racial exclusions evident in contemporary Irish imaginaries of race.

Conclusion

The epistemological challenges to understanding entwined Irish and African diasporic histories in Cuba and the wider Caribbean necessitate a closer engagement with sources across local colonial archives read from multiple perspectives, particularly that of women and Black lineages with links to Irish slave-owners. The pervasive presence of Irish names in the Cuban archives associated with plantation slavery, when read as ‘a counter-history of the human’ embody Black lives erased in the production of knowledge about Black history and Irish migration history. Under-researched sources provide concrete accounts of close and asymmetrical power relations between these disparate diasporas. Once these links are acknowledged it is ‘by playing with the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view’ (Hartman, 2007, 11) that we find new voices and perspectives like those amplified here. The stories that emerge from centuries of loss and violence are painful and troubling, but the fact that they continue to haunt the present of who we are demands our attention if only ‘as something akin to remedy’ (4), as a corrective to our interrogation of the past. In this research I have refocused some of the basic elements of the Irish migration story by foregrounding African lineages whose ancestral heritage and identity, severed and erased in the name of slave owners, is linked to Ireland. In order to undo the slow epistemic violence, it behoves scholars to focus on the submerged histories of propertied exiles from Ireland who accumulated wealth by denying humanity and kinship to generations of Africans. It is through the maternal line of African women and the heritability of slavery that Irish names are carried into and haunt the present. By linking African lives with the Irish legacy in Cuba we find a new approach to re-present and analyse the coloniality of Irish surnames in the genealogies of slavery. In doing so we see the erasures that structure Irish diasporic historiography, particularly the systematic omission of Irish complicity in Caribbean slavery. On the connections between Ireland and the Caribbean where, ‘the practices of co-belonging and community have been released from the conventions of genealogy […] – though not free of ongoing divisions based on ideas of race and ethnic difference’, the question of Irishness and Irish legacies is ‘inextricably, even if invisibly, linked to the missing ancestor’ (Donnell, 2015, 109). The production of knowledge about Irishness and Irish diasporic populations in different locations in the Americas cannot be confined to ‘natal identity’ alone (111). Such heteronormative and racialised modes of research focused on kinship not only limit, but fail to acknowledge the contested histories of Irish connections to the Caribbean.

If we are ‘to recruit the past for the sake of the living’ an ethical remembering that excavates the erasures when narrating connected diasporic histories will elucidate ‘who we are in relation to who we have been’ (Hartman, 2008, 13). In this sociohistorical examination of the exclusion of Blackness from Irishness and Irish history including histories of the Irish global diaspora there is an evident need to examine past interpretations of colonial ideas of race that continue in the present. By placing the 2004 referendum within a transhistorical trajectory shaped by Ireland's Atlantic entanglements, it becomes possible to recognise the citizenship referendum not as an aberration, but as a contemporary iteration of racial logics that were incubated in the colonial and diasporic projects of the past. The erasures that structure Irish diasporic historiography, particularly of Irish complicity in Caribbean slavery, persist into the present as processes of racial codification, whereby citizenship in post-referendum Ireland remains tethered to whiteness and genealogical purity. This reconfiguration of citizenship law reasserted a racial capitalist genealogy that I argue subsumes colonial narratives that exclude Blackness from Irishness and Irish national belonging redeployed to police contemporary borders of reproduction, belonging and state protection.

In response to Mullen's call (2024) to explore the erasure and bias in Irish academic knowledge production with regard to Black people in Ireland, research that engages with History, Critical Race studies and Irish Black Studies to look more deeply at contested histories of women and Black people neglected by Irish Studies is necessary if we are to reach a more precise interpretation of past leakages into present understandings of gender and race in Irish society.