A01=Shahmima Akhtar
Author_Shahmima Akhtar
British Empire
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Category=NHTB
Category=NHTQ
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exhibitions
identity-making
Ireland
Irishness
performance
visitors
visual
world fairs
Product details
- ISBN 9781526194930
- Weight: 343g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Shahmima Akhtar is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Birmingham
