The Republic of Ireland is a unique postcolonial State. The prototypical British settler colony, the Irish were colonizers and colonized, emigrants and immigrants, black and white. The white Irish maternal body has been constitutionally ‘policed, controlled and abused’; when black female bodies entered the scene, colonial technologies of gendered racism were deployed to force them through Irish borders as texts—or bodyborders— on which State-led anti-immigration and anti-asylum discourses were written and circulated.
The paper draws from a year-long feminist participatory theatre research project with women from the African continent at the Irish asylum/migration nexus, using an Artist/Academic/Activist model to carve spaces for autonomous, self-directed representation. I first stage the re-signification of the ‘Third World woman’ in global refugee representations as hypervisible but speechless objects of a new humanitarianism, ripe for co-option in western liberal feminist projects (e.g. Women, Peace and Security, Gender-Based Violence and Migration studies). I then (re) attach the figurative/ represented black female body with the material flesh-and-blood bodies of women and their everyday lives at the Irish asylum/migration nexus. Warehoused for years on end in carceral spaces of Direct Provision (Irish asylum Detention), the women reported feeling ‘tired’ and ‘used’. I asked, ‘What work are they doing as they do asylum?’ As they circulate through the spaces of asylum—courts, State welfare agencies, charitable organizations, NGOs and the media—their bodies and identities are exhibited, surveilled,fetishized, and used to ‘market’ humanitarianism through feminism. Their everyday lives extract their representational and affective labour, and meanwhile, in immigration detention, their material labour—of waiting—is appropriated at the asylum-prison. This paper focuses on a border/space largely ignored in asylum literature —the body itself, and the maternal body in particular. It alter-narrates the postcolonial asylum encounter as non-performative of the promises it makes, but re-makes bodies and identities, manifests re-colonizing spaces and structures and puts black female bodyborders to political and cultural work in hyper diverse 21st Century white nations. Decolonial feminist research praxis can undo epistemic violence, decenter the white maleness of dominating ‘blockbuster’ theories and legalistic/human rights-based asylum scholarship and speak back to the whiteness of feminism.

Nilmini Fernando is a Sri Lankan born postcolonial feminist scholar and educator with special interest in intersectionality, critical race and whiteness studies and decolonial feminist praxis. She has worked in Ireland and is currently based n Melbourne Australia, where her research has focused on financial abuse in the family violence context. Nilmini is currently developing a practice-based tool for intersectional practice in the Australian settler colonial context. A member of Australian Women and Gender Studies Association, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies and Institute of Postcolonial Studies, she originated Loving Feminist Literature, a women of colour collective that performs texts by feminists of colour.

Nilmini Fernando

A short film is available to illustrate the look and feel of the project.