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- Author: Shahmima Akhtar x
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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.
Using the findings of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change, published in 2018, this chapter considers how anti-racist action has been undertaken in history higher education in the UK. The report found that undergraduate-level history was overwhelmingly white in terms of students, that the numbers were even lower when it came to postgraduate-level history and that ‘history academic staff are less diverse than H&PS student cohorts’. Taking stock of these findings, many history departments across UK universities reviewed, strengthened or created anew their equality, diversity and inclusivity agendas. Ranging from efforts to diversify curriculum content to improving mechanisms to report racial abuse, this chapter will reflect on the effectiveness of these proposals. As the postdoctoral fellow funded by the Past and Present Society to embed the impact of the Race Report, the author offers a critical perspective on how the race equality work so clearly envisioned in the report not only mirrors but is reinforced by the equality work taking place in wider Britain. The museum and heritage sector, those working with schools and the curriculum and those producing history for the public are working in a mutually constitutive set of structures to engender anti-racist action and behaviour. By tracing the intellectual development of the RHS’s equalities work as it ties to the anti-racist work we can see in Britain more broadly, the chapter reflects on the extent to which meaningful change can occur in history higher education.
Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that attracted audiences from the far reaches of the globe. As a source of entertainment and education, they operated under a triptych of commercial motivations and outcomes: to stimulate trade for the displayed countries, to encourage sales of the exhibited goods, and to provide the employment of local labourers. The politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. The practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers’ motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself, which in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially, or culturally as industrialists, capitalists, women, Home Rulers, British imperialists, nationalists, and Republicans. The fluid nature of embodied Irish identity in international contexts as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent state is evoked in the book’s larger analysis. Exhibiting Irishness is transnational in scope, encompassing exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire, and the United States, and each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic, and cultural locale of its time. Thus, the lens of exhibitions reveals several unique arguments regarding Irish identities as singular and broader collectives working with and through gender, capitalism, and race in a larger configuration of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s.
This chapter follows the Famine exodus to the United States and considers the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to illustrate how exhibitions of the Irish interacted with transatlantic activism and philanthropy. It focuses on Lady Aberdeen’s and Alice Hart’s Irish villages, designed to help the Irish poor by analysing planning documents, written correspondence, and reports from the fair. Both women’s philanthropy was in keeping with the revival ethos popular in nineteenth-century Ireland and supported the renewal of cottage industries by presenting the country as a tranquil space in the fairground. Elite women used Irish exhibitions to combat poverty by presenting a rural Ireland worthy of revival, targeting Irish migrants in the United States. Significantly, the preservation of Ireland’s rural aesthetics for elite consumption became equal to ‘saving Ireland’ for many female philanthropists involved in a benevolent charitable politics. Their split and the eventual presentation of two Irish villages reveal differences in the Irish Home Rule movement, with Aberdeen adopting a more moderate vision of Irish independence in contrast to Hart’s more radical perspective. The two women’s display of Irishness enabled a language of nation to emerge that reinforced a separation from England and a connectedness with Ireland in the United States. They addressed issues of migration by offering a transnational representation of a rural Ireland enveloped within an Irish American identity. The advertising of Ireland tugged on the heartstrings in a clever, profitable way; visitors could buy a trinket or souvenir and simultaneously feel like they were helping further Irish industry.  Â
This chapter examines the interwar British Empire exhibitions to show how the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland each used display to champion their global agendas and distinct relationships to the British Empire. Northern Ireland visualised its loyalty and union with the United Kingdom, whereas the Free State championed its independence and emphasised its separation from the imperial project. In the exhibitions of the 1920s, the image of Ireland was dominated by Northern Ireland and its Union with Britain as the Free State refused to participate. Northern Ireland expressly used exhibitions to demonstrate its allegiance to the United Kingdom, to further their trade in linen and shipping, and to consolidate their national standing. However, some Irish citizens critiqued this imperial identification as sacrificing and obfuscating the power and autonomy of Northern Ireland. Exhibitions of the 1930s saw a narrative shift as the Free State embraced exhibitions in their nation-building project. Organisers constructed displays of traditional arts and crafts alongside technological advancement and history to bolster their new country. They rejected past depictions of Irishness and espoused the country’s dominion status in the Commonwealth, stressing a separation from the British Empire. The chapter exposes how both the Free State and Northern Ireland used exhibitions as a platform to create new forms of Ireland and Irishness in the interwar period. Different political and ideological positions on empire worked themselves out in the display and its reception.
This chapter follows the trajectory of a single Irish Village named Ballymaclinton in the early twentieth century and demonstrates how agitation over Home Rule was bodily enacted within the fairground through performing whiteness. In particular, a commercial union with Britain was powerfully evoked by two Irish entrepreneurs, David and Robert Brown, who advertised soap by exploiting popular images of Ireland. The chapter demonstrates that an Irish brand was used to convince international visitors of Irish whiteness, which was deemed to be central for commercial profit. For the first time, exhibits of Ireland were organised exclusively by Irish entrepreneurs. They traded on familiar stereotypes of Ireland to create an accessible and financially lucrative image of the country to further their company’s sales which was tied to the politics of Home Rule considered necessary for the business’s expansion. The Brown brothers combined business and philanthropy to sell soap in their commercial extravaganza. Ballymaclinton petitioned against Home Rule and visualised the benefits of Unionism for the broader Irish and British populace. It cultivated a white Irishness that amalgamated an Irish past – rooted in history and tradition – and an Irish present and future – stemmed in industry and investment. However, the coupling of these two narratives often became unstuck and revealed the internal contradictions of the Village project. The chapter convincingly evokes how a white racialisation politics intersected with Home Rule debates to prove and authenticate Irish acceptance into the white, British respectability structures of early-twentieth-century capitalism.
The chapter considers Ireland’s post-Famine exhibitions in the 1850s to argue that they became a crucial stage through which to debate post-Famine reconstruction policies. Ideas of Ireland’s recovery after its national tragedy were contested along nationalist and unionist lines to varying effects. This chapter argues that Ireland was theorised as a transitional space in constant need of development after suffering from famine and long-term poverty. A progressive timeline for Irish advancement was visualised in the fairs of the 1850s, which evoked an Irish past as a means for surviving in the present through hope for the future. This relied on laissez-faire politics and the power of the individual (mainly women) to survive hardship based on their individual labour through a competing unionist or nationalist framework. In the 1850s, narratives of Ireland’s future in London, Cork, and Dublin, like its exhibition, reporting, and reception, were contradictory and subject to revision. Through the consistent narration of Ireland as developing, the exhibitions did not demonstrate Ireland’s prowess to the world but instead became an opportunity for Ireland to learn from the industry of others. While the 1851 Exhibition can be read as what the British government allied with Irish industrialists wanted for Ireland, the 1852 and 1853 exhibitions reveal how an Irish nationalism interacted with the period’s broader imperialism for Ireland’s economic expansion. The exhibitions of the 1850s demonstrate that a hybridity of politics on Irish development were held by Irishmen and women within the mixed loyalties of Irish unionism and Irish nationalism.  Â
This chapter interrogates Ireland’s post-colonial moment. In the 1960s Ireland’s display took many forms and was debated extensively. There was an Irish Village on the Pike at the Seattle World Expo 1962 and an Irish Pavilion in the New York World’s Fair 1964–65. After much debate, Ireland finally withdrew from the Montreal World Expo 1967. The chapter demonstrates how the rationale behind exhibitions had significantly shifted by the 1960s, as success was no longer defined by immediate financial profit but within the diplomatic sphere. Importantly, funding of the events moved from private industrialists to public taxes, creating more accountability and greater criticism when financial failings were reported. Irish politicians largely recognised that exhibitions had spurious financial gain and instead their value came from being seen on the world stage in a break from earlier displays that sought trade and profit. Despite the country’s financial troubles, the importance of presence on the world stage gained significance for a struggling Ireland. Ireland’s continued participation in the expensive expositions of the late twentieth century reflected how concerns of international diplomacy eclipsed issues of commercial profit since financial losses were so likely. Overall, exhibitions were no longer needed for mass advertising, which made the ideological motives of exhibits obsolete in the 1960s. Yet the chapter highlights how issues of state propaganda usurped the need for financial gains like earlier centuries given the performative requirements of global capitalism.
The commodification of Irishness now articulates itself in a multi-billion-pound industry that capitalises on motifs of the country. For instance, so-called Irish pubs exist in almost every country of Europe, with shamrocks a regular feature of modern life. Stereotypical images of Irishness rooted in the land and its people have a currency and traction that transcends borders, and we can see their origins in international exhibitions. The exhibitions created marketable symbols of Irishness that now have a life of their own, articulated primarily through the tourism industry. In the same way that exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accommodated for different politics and biases, the mass market of Irishness is deluged with predictable motifs of Irishness, divorced from its political sphere. A saleable Irishness emerged in exhibits of the past and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture, whether related to the Irish landscape, the Irish people, or Irish products. Overall, the book uncovers that exhibitions are a key conduit for assessing the changing landscape of Irishness over two centuries by focusing on the politics of display.