“Nostalgia and DestiNation: Performing Poverty at the Famine Village Theme Park”
Natalie Harrower
Queen’s University
The island of Doagh, on the northernmost tip of Ireland, boasts a curious attraction for tourists and locals alike: The Doagh Famine Village, whose website sports the tagline “Looking Forward to the Past” http://www.doaghfaminevillage.com/). Visitors to the village are meant to experience what life would have been like during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s, when a quarter of the Irish population became homeless, died, or emigrated. Among the attractions, the outdoor museum includes a variety of reconstructed historical buildings, but importantly, a visit to the village allows spectators to take in staged tableaux of an ‘Eviction Scene’ and an ‘Irish Wake’.
This paper argues that the village trades on diachronic ideas of Irish identity to remap an ‘old’ Ireland onto a contemporary landscape. As the only living bodies at the museum, visitors ‘repopulate’ the now-empty village. The museum sells itself as ‘destination’ for tourists, who ostensibly want a more ‘authentic’ experience of Ireland. Irish identity has undergone significant transformations in the last decade, largely because of the economic powerhouse known as the Celtic Tiger; the idea of ‘authenticity’ suggested by the museum, therefore, is one that imagines Ireland as rural and destitute. The village capitalizes on one of Ireland’s most painful moments in history through a complex form of nostalgia that has been built on a waning notion of Irish identity. Visitors to the museum, some of whom may be from the Irish diaspora, are able to ‘perform’ this outmoded Irish identity in a way that romanticises the past as a potentially attractive alternative to the increasingly urban, international Ireland of the 21st century.
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