‘A Stuffed Gold Coast Monkey’: Exhibiting Irish-Africa in the Missionary Exhibitions in 20 th Century Ireland.”

The Irish Catholic Missionary network was a complex enterprise. Beneath the heroic and spiritual veneer, these enterprises were filled with ambiguities. It was produced in an imperial context, but was not imperial; it benefited and indeed supported the colonial enterprise, but was not colonial. It was often keenly nationalist and Irish, but often practicing with Catholic Orders with French and Belgian origins. It was shaped unquestionably by the rules and ambitions of the Vatican, carefully managed by the Propagation of the Faith, whose accounts reached into every parish in Ireland. This makes the missionary complex a varied and mottled field of enterprise, riddled with incongruities and contradictions – a narrative sometimes made more oblique by the biographies, hagiographies and histories prepared by missionaries and mission houses, and by some of the more recent nostalgic texts and film who have rediscovered the Irish - African and Asian connection forged through the missions. Against this background, this paper will explore the development of Missionary Exhibitions held variously in Belfast, Dublin and Cork during the middle of the 20 th century. These spaces and performances offer concentrated insights into the modernity and racial ideology of the missionary enterprise and their elaborate engagements with visual culture and political spectacle that helped mobilise the imaginative and social engagement with Irish-Africa