The sociology of critical diasporan epistemology: British state and academic erasure of post-war Irish immigrants

This article engages with a critical moment in the lives of the post-war generation of Irish immigrants – their vanishing from the British social and cultural map. Across the state, academy and popular culture, portrayals of the Irish are discursively represented as contingent upon a pervasive containing category of the black–white dualism and an accompanying power relations of oppression and dominance oppositional racial logic. In response to the dominant narrative of the state and academic erasure of the Irish, the article suggests a critical intervention, the sociology of critical diasporan epistemology, consisting of three interconnecting conceptual moves: a nuanced account of the black–white dualism that complicates the notion of Irish invisibility; a shift from a competitive hierarchal model to a relational model of state–migrant relations; and a dynamic intersectional analysis with accompanying complex hierarchies of power. This enables a re-reading of the dominant historical narrative and its legacy for contemporary society, while making visible the Irish in the wider story of British sociology of migration and ethnicity.