Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture by Diane Sabenacio Nititham Rebecca Boyd

Author:Diane Sabenacio Nititham, Rebecca Boyd [Diane Sabenacio Nititham, Rebecca Boyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367600167
Google: 4fySzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-06-30T03:22:04+00:00

St Patrick’s Day on Montserrat

The present celebration of St Patrick’s Day on Montserrat as an official, week-long festival is one of the most unlikely, if increasingly well known, commemorations of the saint outside of Ireland. Images of the inhabitants of the island dressed in their newly-invented national costume (a green, white and orange “Irish” tartan) are now widely accessible, due to international media coverage, the internet and Montserratian floats having graced parades throughout the Irish diaspora. These images of the “Black Irish” embracing their European heritage—whether this hybrid identity is based on an historic shared space or even in some cases blood-lines—nonetheless conceal the protracted and often contentious path that led to the island’s official adoption of St Patrick’s Day as a national holiday. They also do not reveal how debates about the reasons for celebrating the saint’s day have continued since that time and have only truly abated in response to the vastly changed circumstances brought about by ecological disasters on the island. The devastating double impacts of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and the ongoing eruptions of the Soufrière Hills volcano since 1995 have resulted in widespread destruction and more than half of the island being rendered uninhabitable. This in turn has led to yet another reevaluation on the island about what St Patrick’s Day means and how it can be put to use again, now that the island has its own substantial diaspora.

Through the examination of the newspaper archive in the “Montserrat Collection” of the island’s Public Library, a complicated story emerges of an island that had little in-depth knowledge of St Patrick’s Day and its Irish connections in the mid-20th century, and of attempts by public intellectuals on the island to use the day for “ideological reorientation” amongst the population from the mid-1970s onwards (Montserrat Mirror, 13 March 1979). We take a chronological approach to exploring the changing meanings of St Patrick’s Day, one that will intersect with overarching themes such as postcolonial, left-wing politics, the Black Power movement, the role of the Roman Catholic church, the changing spatial dimensions of the festival’s home, and the repositioning of the festival as a gathering-point for the diaspora that has emerged since the 1995 eruption began.

Newspapers as Sources of Public Opinion

Newspapers are a most useful source for gauging opinions on current issues at the local and national level; this is particularly true for a small island community such as Montserrat, where a weekly newspaper can be central to communicating news, highlighting issues, and debating controversies amongst the island’s population. In such an isolated and constrained environment, the local newspaper is, and remains, central to the lives of the islanders. While this was particularly the case in the pre-internet age, it is still largely true, despite the impact of globalization and the internet in recent decades. In particular, the increasing tendency throughout the 20th century for the Caribbean islands to look to the USA for trade, investment and technology (and the resultant impact this has on island media, lifestyle and

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