Global Identities

Historic Houses, Global Crossroads Research Blend 4: Global Identities

RB4 is focusing on disrupting the assumed narratives around Mount Stewart and Clandeboye, counteracting the patriotic and military constructions of identity that privilege conquest, violence and national supremacy as exclusively determinant of imperial identity. We are analysing the mythologies that have been constructed around the estates and the families and individuals who lived in and around them, exploring ‘national’ identities across time as porous and unstable, formed in tension with strong impulses for self-determination and expression of Indigenous and other diverse cultural logics of identity. These were manifested in revivals of traditional forms of identity based on kinship, clan, and lineage, exemplified in Tír nanÓg, Edith Londonderry’s ‘Celtic’ burial site.

We are working with communities in Northern Ireland that do not traditionally relate to or engage with these historic spaces to explore the complex identities associated with these houses, and the local and global networks of cultural exchange of which they were a part, enabling multiple publics to meaningfully connect their lived experience with them.