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Ireland in the 1960s debated, considered, decided, and undecided whether or not to exhibit its country, wares, and peoples in the exhibitions of neighbouring countries. Seattle in 1962 was the first to extend an invitation, which after due consideration and several months of deliberation was rejected. The next was New York in 1964, which clinched Ireland’s presence
even took up where the British left off, as Nayantara Pothen demonstrates, perpetuating ‘the Club’ and its ‘form’ to the exclusion of many other Indians. 4 These traverses, on several levels and in different directions, were not generally engaged with by Roman Catholics in India, let alone by Loreto. Being caught as the tide went out on empire was not unique to Loreto in India. Later, in the 1960s, other Loreto foundations abroad would find themselves in similar situations: for example, the Mau Mau
s to the 1960s, which exposes productive avenues to read visitors’ responses, criticisms, and legacies of the displays. To broaden the focus of interpretation, visual sources that illustrate the significance of symbols of Ireland in the form of postcards, photographs, and paintings are read in conjunction with meeting minutes and exhibition committee reports. Within the constructed world of the
Exhibiting Irishness traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and the 1960s as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally connected state. 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. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exhibitions captured the imagination of organisers and visitors. The global displays were heralded as a unique, profitable, and unsurpassed forum for celebrating a country’s wares, vying for increased trade, and consolidating national mores. Exhibitions were grand spectacles that showcased the manufactures, industries, arts, technologies, histories, and communities of various nations on an international platform for the consumption of millions of visitors over several months. Each chapter 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, a separation that continues today. In sum, this book tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness – an Irish identity always on sale.
shore up their minority settler populations. This chapter examines policies surrounding migration in the United Kingdom, Rhodesia and South Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s alongside the experiences of migrants. It argues that in all three cases, the end of formal imperial ties led to state efforts to strengthen and preserve nations imagined in racial terms as white. The challenge that decolonisation brought to the previously held racialised order of things contributed to a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, which can
and especially in the immediate post-war decades, the majority of British migrants moved to Commonwealth countries. From 1946 to 2000, more than 8 million Britons left the United Kingdom and more than 5 million of these migrants moved to countries in the empire and former empire. The proportion was close to 90 per cent in the 1950s, it was 74 per cent in the 1960s, 59 per cent in the 1970s, 46 per cent in the 1980s and dropped to 32 per cent in the 1990s as British migrants increasingly moved to European destinations such as France
British population – the ‘best human material’ – were capable of taking on leading roles in a globalising world. Given Chislett's high level of civic activity, it is likely that he shared similar diagnoses and prescriptions in a wide range of associational settings over the course of the 1960s, including with his Rotary Club (where he served as Chair of the International Committee), in the Rotherham Celebrity Lectures Group, and at his frequent film screenings. 3 Chislett's participation in Rotherham civic society illustrates how those
In the 1960s the world shrank for the British public. In a literal sense, they lost an empire. The start of the decade marked the most intense period of decolonisation and, by its end, more than twenty-five colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean had gained independence. With each independence ceremony, with each newly hoisted flag, the pink area on the map retreated. But the world was becoming smaller in other ways as well. The 1960s were distinctive not just for the rapid pace of decolonisation, but also for a boom in
almost entirely teaching order, with its non-cloistered founder, Mary Ward. Few of the sisters interviewed for this book saw Vatican II itself as a key dividing line in India that facilitated their forays into the secular world. However, film-going, restaurant visits, and shopping outside the convent could now be enjoyed. Furthermore, the later 1960s brought the realisation that convent life itself was mostly based on European seventeenth-century monasticism, with little applicability to India. 42
book reveals the importance of exhibitions in innovating the commodification of Irishness via networks of capitalism during the 1850s to the 1960s. Competing notions of development influenced Irish display and its broader history. Differing state and non-state, Irish and non-Irish, actors envisaged industrialisation or rural commodification and tourism – all within a reflexive nationalist or unionist