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Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so-called golden age of European Immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobb Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance-based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled 'Calling Up Annie Moore'. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed. INSETS: Untitled;Untitled;Annie Moore (1887-1923). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how a double sense of commencement and legislation embedded in the word archive might be used to trace a different way of understanding the histories of Irish immigration and the moment of arrival in the so-called New World. After a chance encounter with the bronze portrait sculpture of Annie Moore, who was the first immigrant processed through the Ellis Island Immigration Station in New Jersey and New York, when it opened in 1892, a project was initially developed to trace some of the buried histories of immigration to the U.S. Extensive research into the life of Moore turned up archival documents, guidebooks, commemorative plaques and photo captions that endlessly restated the same facts of her arrival. The figure of Moore disappeared in a series of dead ends, gaps and ellipses within an archive that represents an Irish immigrant woman as an exemplary U.S. citizen. The tautological structure of the archive reinforces a systematic amnesia of the social and historical conditions that led to the arrival and eventual assimilation of Moore. Using several methods to call up Annie Moore, the radical discontinuities between early immigrant histories and the social conditions of non-European immigrants dwelling in the contemporary U.S. and Ireland have been traced.