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Transatlantic Scots

Transatlantic Scots

Contributions by Celeste Ray, Margaret Bennett, Edward J. Cowan, Paul Basu, Andrew Hook, Grant Jarvie, Colin McArthur, John W. Sheets, Michael Vance and Jonathan Dembling

382 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 x 1.30 in, Illus.

Paperback
9780817352400
Published: October 2005

$34.95

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eBook
9780817384203
Published: July 2010

$34.95

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Examines the impact of the Scottish legacy on North American cultures and heritage

During the past four decades, growing interest in North Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new Scottish clan and heritage societies. Well over 300 Scottish Highland games and gatherings annually take place across the U.S. and Canada.

Transatlantic Scots is a multidisciplinary collection that studies the regional organization and varied expressions of the Scottish Heritage movement in the Canadian Maritimes, the Great Lakes, New England, and the American South. From diverse perspectives, authorities in their fields consider the modeling of a Scottish identity that distances heritage celebrants from prevalent visions of whiteness. Considering both hyphenated Scots who celebrate centuries-old transmission of Scottish traditions and those for whom claiming or re-claiming a Scottish identity is recent and voluntary, this book also examines how diaspora themes and Highland imagery repeatedly surface in regional public celebrations and how traditions are continually reinvented through the accumulation of myths. The underlying theoretical message is that ethnicity and heritage survive because of the flexibility of history and tradition.

This work is a lasting contribution to the study of ethnicity and identity, the renegotiation of history and cultural memory into heritage, and the public performance and creation of tradition.

Celeste Ray is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South and editor of Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism.

“Anthropologist Ray has assembled an impressive collection of essays that offer a comprehensive, insightful view of Scottish ethnicity in North America. The compilation reaches across academic boundaries, combining regional histories of institutional Scottish ethnicity in Canada and the southern US with anthropological analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship. The essays also cover a wide ideological spectrum in their discussion of the reasons behind the contemporary resurgence of expatriate interest in Scottish heritage, ranging from Andrew Hook's attribution of regional racism in the southern US to Ray's focus on interracial participation in Scots American festivities. The collection's most significant contribution comes through Ray's acknowledgement of expatriate creativity. This insight frees contributors from a pedantic fixation on authenticity and encourages them to address deeper issues such as the rise of Scottish heritage tourism, gender constraints at Highland games, and the establishment of Tartan Day in the US. The collection transcends the simple debate over the merits of Scottish ethnicity to address the more profound questions regarding its nature. Highly recommended.”
—CHOICE

“Transatlantic Scots is a sophisticated theoretical treatment written in a lively and readable style. . . . This is a terrific collection.”
—Sydel Silverman, City University of New York

“A first-generation study of this key phenomenon. Its innovative and contemporary analysis fills a gaping hole within the broad core continuum of circum-Atlantic ethnicity and makes a major contribution to the study of transnational heritage and cultural memory. Words like vigorous, rare, and convergent describe this book.”
—Martha Ward, University of New Orleans

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