ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“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
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“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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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations 000
Foreword
James Hunter 000
Introduction
Celeste Ray 000
1. Transatlantic Scots and Ethnicity
Celeste Ray 000
2. Scottish Immigration and Ethnic Organization in the United
States
Celeste Ray 000
3. A Brief History of Organized Scottishness in Canada
Michael Vance 000
4. From the Quebec-Hebrideans to "les Écossais-Québécois":
Tracing the Evolution of a Scottish Cultural Identity in Canada's
Eastern Townships
Margaret Bennett 000
5. Powerful Pathos: The Triumph of Scottishness in Nova Scotia
Michael Vance 000
6. You Play It as You Would Sing It: Cape Breton, Scottishness,
and the Means of Cultural Production
Jonathan Dembling 000
7. The North American Émigré, Highland Games, and Social Capital
in International Communities
Grant Jarvie 000
8. Troubling Times in the Scottish-American Relationship
Andrew Hook 000
9. Bravehearts and Patriarchs: Masculinity on the Pedestal in
Southern Scottish Heritage Celebration
Celeste Ray 000
10. Finding Colonsay's Emigrants and a "Heritage of Place"
John W. Sheets 000
11. Pilgrims to the Far Country: North American "roots-tourists"
in the Scottish Highlands and Islands
Paul Basu 000
12. Tartan Day
Edward J. Cowan 000
13. Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors, and the Scottish
Discursive Unconscious
Colin McArthur 000
Contributors 000
Index 000