The Cork Catholic Missionary Exhibition, 1937: Negotiating the Irish representation of Indigenous peoples
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Date
2023-01
Authors
Linehan, Denis
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Publisher
Wiles Trust
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Abstract
Between 1932 and 1937, four Catholic Missionary Exhibitions were held in Ireland. These shows, which attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, offer remarkable insights into the structure and outlook of the Irish Catholic missionary enterprise. Their elaborate engagements with visual and material culture mobilised an imaginative and social engagement with foreign peoples and lands that reflect a distinctive cultural history of race and difference. In this chapter, I will reflect on the general character of the Missionary exhibitions in modern Ireland but focus in detail on the Cork Missionary Exhibition of 1937, in part because it has been neglected historically and also because of the novel way it set out to represent Indigenous People, which up to this time and indeed after, were consistently racially stereotyped. As I proceed, I will draw upon the cultural histories of exhibition space, curating, and collections, which offer insights into the significance of objects and how they are mobilised in various forms of knowledge production. My contribution here is also guided by work in historical and cultural geography, which has recast exhibitions as a particular kind of urban assemblage, a gathering of tangible and intangible ideas reproduced through the regimes of curation and inter-mobility of objects, people and experiences.
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Keywords
Nation and Empire in the 19th-20th Centuries , Belfast: Wiles Trust. , Nation , Empire , Ireland
Citation
Linehan, D. (2023) 'The Cork Catholic Missionary Exhibition, 1937: Negotiating the Irish representation of Indigenous peoples', In: Ireland and Missions: Identity, Nation and Empire in the 19th-20th Centuries, Belfast: Wiles Trust, forthcoming publication.