Race, Ethnicity, Wales and the World – serie

Interest in race and ethnicity research in Wales has grown apace in the last decade, opening up wider debates about the nature, focus and content of what collectively is called Welsh Studies. Across a range of disciplines, we are witnessing not only a ‘global turn’ placing Wales more substantively within a plethora of global interconnections, but also a ‘decolonial turn’ that involves the questioning of disciplinary traditions and knowledge production, and highlighting the colonial legacy that shapes academic pursuits. In the present text, we explore the development of Welsh Studies through the lens of race/ethnicity. Contributors from history, heritage studies, literature, film, policy, social and cultural studies offer case analyses adopting new perspectives, theoretical routes and methodological innovations, with the aim of illustrating aspects of the decolonising of knowledge production.

Inspired by decolonial thinking, this book challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony, and in particular disrupts the myth of Welsh–Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing less familiar accounts in the record. A newly-developed framework applies three logics – possession, racialization/barbarisation, and assimilation – to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales’s complex position as both colonised and coloniser. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.Dr Lucy Taylor - Herio stori draddodiadol Y Wladfa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69OHDvETtu8Dr Lucy Taylor - Challenging the traditional telling of Welsh Patagonia’s story https://youtu.be/6PJe300cVjY?si=BJdkYxglWAjVYJASWatch Lucy Taylor in conversation with Paul O’Leary at the National Library of Wales here.