Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, race, and nation, c. 1850-1970

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.Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, race, and nation, c. 1850-1970 is written by Shahmima Akhtar and published by Manchester University Press. ISBNs for Exhibiting Irishness are 9781526157256, 152615725X and the print ISBNs are 9781526157263, 1526157268. Additional ISBNs include 9781526157270.