Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History

Abstract

He was a young Irishman ...he had the silent enduring beauty of a carved ivory negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha aims at, and which negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And thus a swimming through, like rats in a dark river. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover