Exhibiting Irishness
Empire, race, and nation, c. 1850-1970
By Shahmima Akhtar
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- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 264
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: July 2024
- Series: Studies in Imperialism
Description
Exhibiting Irishness analyses how exhibitions enabled Irish individuals and groups to work out (privately and publicly) their politicised existences across two centuries. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. My research demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland's political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Contents
Introduction: Irish identities on display
1 Famine and industry: Ireland's original exhibitions
2 Diaspora and migration: Displayed Ireland abroad
3 Home rule and capitalism: Irish modernities
4 Interwar and partition: A divided Ireland
5 Debt and disagreement: Postcolonial Ireland
Conclusion: Ireland on display
Bibliography
Index
Author
Shahmima Akhtar is Assistant Professor of Black and Asian British History at University of Birmingham