Chapter 10 - Arrivals: Inward Migration and Irish Literature

Summary

An increase in the numbers of people migrating to Ireland in the 1990s spurred a parallel interest in literary representations of a new multicultural Ireland. Until very recently, such representations have been predominantly authored by white Irish writers. In this chapter, I instead focus on fiction and poetry produced in the last decade by migrant writers of colour in Ireland. The perspective afforded in this work is not simply an add-on to the already existing body of literary work about ‘multicultural Ireland’. Rather, it is, among other things, a corrective to the centring of the dominant white ‘native’ point of view on the ‘migrant other’. In the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, migrant writers of colour are breaking through into the literary and cultural mainstream with work that centres migrant of colour consciousness and, particularly in the case of young emerging artists, that experiments with form, genre, and medium in ways that circumvent established literary norms and circuits of exchange.