CID · Cuban-Irish Diasporas: Gender, Race and Ethnic Whitening Strategies

Cuban-Irish Diasporas: Gender, Race and Ethnic Whitening Strategies

STAND ALONE SUMMARY Cuba-Ireland Digital Archive (CIDA) is a digital humanities (DH) project concerned with the entangled histories of Irish, European and African Diasporas in colonial Cuba. Drawing on untapped and endangered sources selected from Cuban, Irish, Spanish, and British archives, the digital repository is organised for open access and analysis of individuals' lives caught up in the nexus of transatlantic Irish migration and Atlantic slavery. This examination of interactions by early Irish settlers with respect to whitening processes, slavery and abolition in the Hispanic Caribbean contributes new perspectives to the study of Irish migration history and to global historiography of European migration to Cuba and the Caribbean generally. The study examines the place of Irish ethnicity in the colonial racial project of blanqueamiento or whitening predicated on race mixing. This investigation of intersecting processes of gender, race, and class permits a deeper understanding of how Spanish colonial social hierarchies shaped Irish-African relations in a time of escalating slavery in Cuba. Moreover, Irish surnames, when conceptualised as markers of human property, open up genealogical lines of African people and their descendants originating in the asymmetrical and violent power relations of slavery, evidence of Irish involvement in slavery and the slave trade. The final phase focused on decoding the designation of Irish surnames through enslavement making it possible to generate African identities and build individual biographical profiles of people enslaved by Irish migrants. The data is recorded and analysed with RegID, a digital identities tool available on Walk With Web. Using digital tools for social network analysis we can realise a deeper understanding of the interactions between African and Irish people in the Hispanic colonial society of Cuba. The findings contribute to a neglected critique of epistemic violence and knowledge production in both Caribbean and Irish Studies. In addition, the construction of a database and a curated open access aggregate bilingual collection of digital sources hosted at the University of Galway (UOG) has made this data amenable to digital analysis such as prosopography, mapping with geolocation, interactive maps, and visualisation. Datasets will be made available for a broad range of study including digital humanities, scholarly research and creative cultural production. This examination of the history of European colonialism and settlement in the Caribbean has broader relevance to current global migration and integration challenges. The findings throw light on colonial legacies of gender, race and unfreedom in current discourses about inward migration to Europe

Data: CORDIS, © European Union