Exhibiting Irishness - (Studies in Imperialism) by Shahmima Akhtar (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book uncovers that exhibitions uniquely reveal the changing landscape of Irishness over two centuries by analysing the politics of display. It demonstrates how questions of Irishness intersected with broader ideas of citizenship, race and ethnic construction in Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

Exhibiting Irishness traces constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s. It considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures.
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. This volume 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. 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 is 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.

Review Quotes

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

'Akhtar explores Ireland's participation in exhibitions and world fairs as vehicles for expressing fluid cultural, political, and economic Irish identities from 1850 to 1970 within the context of Ireland's relationship with the British Empire and the wider global economy... This book contributes to the study of Ireland, national identity and nationalism, and fairs and exhibitions.'
Recommended by CHOICE

About the Author

Shahmima Akhtar is Assistant Professor of Black and Asian British History at University of Birmingham