Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781526157263

Table of Contents

Reviews

WINNER of the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture 2025 (American Conference for Irish Studies) 'Exhibiting Irishness is a groundbreaking work that is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish history, visual and material culture, art, ethnic and racial studies, and gender studies. Ultimately, it reveals the fragility, ambivalence and relationality of Irishness—something constantly (re)negotiated, questioned and affirmed in line with societal, historical and political changes. The book, thus, has the potential to transform our understanding of exhibitions and their role in (re)constructing and promoting Irishness' Rise Journal -- .

Author Information

Shahmima Akhtar is Lecturer in History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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