Exhibiting Irishness

Exhibiting Irishness traces constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s. Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As sources of entertainment and education, they were enmeshed in the politics of nationalism, trade and tourism. The book explores how the politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. It considers how the practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers' motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself. This in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially or culturally. The chapters examine exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire and the United States. As a valuable contribution to scholarship, each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic and cultural locale of its time. By thinking transnationally, the book explores how Irishness worked itself out through gender, capitalism and race in a larger network of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s. A saleable Irishness emerged in historic exhibits and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture. Tourism today offers the Irish landscape, the Irish people, and Irish products. Exhibiting Irishness tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness - an Irish identity always on sale.