Ireland's Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity
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Overview
This book is the first sustained attempt to incorporate critical scholarship and thought at the cutting edge of contemporary geography, history and archaeology into the burgeoning field of Irish heritage studies. It seeks to illustrate the validity of multiple depictions of the Irish past, showing how scrutiny of heritage practices and meanings is so essential for illuminating our understanding of the present. Examining Ireland's heritages from a critical perspective that celebrates notions of heterogeneity and uniqueness, the distinguished contributors to this book scrutinise the multiplicity of complex relations between heritage, history, memory, commemoration, economy, and cultural identity within various historical, geographical and archaeological contexts. Using several examples and case studies, this book raises issues not only from a uniquely Irish perspective, but also investigates the memorialisation and marketing of the Irish past in overseas locations such as the USA and Australia.Synopsis
Bringing together contributions from historians, geographers, and archaeologists, McCarthy (Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Ireland) presents 13 papers examining relationships between heritage, history, memory, commemoration, economy, and cultural identity in Ireland. The papers are organized around the themes of commemoration and the politics and the politics of heritage; spaces of individual and collective memory; and heritage, economy, and constructs of identity. Examples of specific topics include the 1913 Irish Historic Pageant in New York as the performance of heritage; heritage construction, tourism, and place marketing in Ireland, documentary and oral histories of Irish co-operative creameries, construction of Irish "alterity" in Australia, and national identity and the meanings of tourism since the Irish Civil War. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR