Shahmima Akhtar
Shahmima Akhtar is a PhD student researching Commercial Exhibitions of the Irish in World Fairs’ in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Britain and the US. This blog looks at an iconic Irish Village: “Ballymaclinton”, repeatedly exhibited at World Fairs’.
“Ballymaclinton” was an Irish village, repeatedly exhibited for seventeen years from 1907 to 1924 in various national and international exhibitions. The display of Ballymaclinton fits within a wider context of the exhibition of peoples and places that reached its height in the twentieth century. Exhibitions were alternatively used for commercial purposes, anthropological interest or at its apex as powerful displays of a country’s industrial and economic progress.
Arguably as magnificent displays of a country’s achievement, those that were exhibited became crucial proponents of particular, idiosyncratic narratives.
The British exhibition of the Irish often became a popular means of reinforcing colonial hierarchies, asserting the metropolitan’s core of control and…
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