Marianne Keating Traces the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica

Over the last ten years, artist Marianne Keating has investigated colonial histories linking Ireland and Jamaica, particularly narratives of Irish migration to the Caribbean island around the Great Famine of 1845–52. An Ciúas / The Silence (2023), her new work on the subject, is presented as a three-screen, 57-minute film installation.

Drawing heavily on state and broadcast-media archives, Keating’s film deftly combines found footage, news interviews and extracts from government documents with her own films of landscapes and the occasional new interview. But with at least eight separate sections, Keating has perhaps attempted to integrate too much material. The artist’s story begins with the an Gorta Mór evictions of around 1847. Black and white photographs of ruined homes segue into Victorian illustrations depicting mass emigration of the evicted rural poor travelling by ship to the US, France and Jamaica, where many arrived bound by indentured servitude agreements. Keating introduces us to Mariam Smart, a 100-year-old Jamaican descendant of Killarney emigrants, before gesturing towards similarities between the 1919–21 Irish War of Independence and 1938 Jamaican labour protests. In one of the more surprising and well-resolved sections, Keating demonstrates how the Irish diaspora has played an important role in Jamaican politics through cousins Norman Washington Manley and Alexander Bustamante. Both of Irish descent, with grandfathers who worked on the same sugar plantation (hinted at here through footage of overgrown sugar-cane fields surrounding the abandoned house), Manley and Bustamante were instrumental in establishing the two-party system that came to dominate the country’s politics.

Some sections are too short. A blink-and-you-miss-it piece on the 1970s Irish Women’s Liberation Movement features alarming television vox pops of Irish men proudly proclaiming themselves chauvinists, remarking on their appreciation of women: ‘Every home should have one.’ A similarly speedy gloss of the so-called Tivoli Incursion of 2010 hardly mentions what happened when Jamaican military and police forces attempted to arrest drug lord Christopher Coke, killing 73 civilians in the process.

Keating clearly has impressive knowledge of these histories, and her work on empire and colonial connections is deeply important. To a large extent, the research presented is engaging. Still, I struggled with the amount of material covered, as well as aspects of the artist’s theoretical language. The supporting text, which echoes the artist’s website, speaks of ‘hidden histories’ and ‘challenging the hierarchies generated by the archive’. Addressing the problems of such rhetoric, visual-culture theorist Ariella Azoulay writes in Potential History (2019) that ‘hidden histories’ are not, in fact, hidden, ‘but rather open secrets known far beyond the archive and the grammar invented as guardian of its orderly uses’. Azoulay has been instrumental in reframing perceptions of archives not as collections of neutral documents but as spaces of colonial violence. While Keating clearly has awareness of such conflicts, the narrow confines of her source material mean that the work struggles to attain genuine destabilization of archival power structures.

Keating’s long-term project of untangling and scrutinising histories of Irish diaspora in Jamaica, and highlighting the interconnectedness and creolisation of colonial legacies between England, Ireland and the Caribbean, is vital work. But it is difficult to challenge the hierarchies generated by the archive with a format whose very nature is sequential and non-differentiating. In previous iterations of this research-led endeavour, Keating has shown the work as multiple separate films. Here, the combining of so much source material into one film creates connections, but often confusion, too. The reliance on chronology, and the curiously neutral authorial voice, echoing the archive’s ‘objectivity’, means that there isn’t quite enough undermining taking place. Keating’s film speaks of critical, essential material, but it also reveals the truth of Azoulay’s insistence that ‘the regime of the archive shapes a world, not just distorts the ways it is perceived’.

Marianne Keating's 'An Ciúnas / The Silence' is on view at The Showroom, London until 13 January 2024

_{Main image: Marianne Keating, An Ciúnas / The Silence, 2023, installation view, 2023. Courtesy: The Showroom, London; photograph: Dan Weill Photography}