Lors des trois derniers siècles, comment les Écossais, Irlandais, Gallois, Cornouaillais, Mannois et Bretons sont-ils parvenus à construire leurs identités celtiques ? Au dix-huitième siècle, les régions celtiques et leurs expatriés à Londres et à Paris s’appuyèrent sur la redécouverte de leur héritage celtique pour exprimer leur voix nationale. Les Bretons et les Gallois, puis les Écossais, les Irlandais, les Mannois et les Cornouaillais, se rapprochèrent lors de trois congrès qui identifièrent six langues celtiques apparentées comme essentielles à la survie des cultures celtiques. Elles le sont toujours aujourd’hui. La revitalisation de ces langues a permis aux cultures celtiques de contrecarrer des attaques visant à les éradiquer. Autrefois considérées comme arriérées, les langues celtiques se sont adaptées à l’écriture, à l’imprimerie et au monde moderne. En assurant une continuité entre passé et présent, ces langues forment la mémoire du celtisme. L’héritage celtique de la Galice, lui, a fusionné mémoire et imagination car cette région ne parle plus de langue celtique depuis la conquête romaine de la péninsule ibérique. La celticité qu’elle revendique est à l’origine de son nationalisme face à l’État espagnol. Les six régions celtiques se sont elles aussi inventé une ethnicité celtique car elles utilisent leur nationalisme pour se distinguer de leurs États-hôtes. Le nationalisme a exporté le celtisme au-delà des frontières des régions celtiques. Les identités celtiques écossaises sont issues d’un partenariat entre l’Écosse, lieu de naissance des tartans, des clans et du gaélique écossais, et l’Amérique du Nord, qui a rendu ces aspects mondialement célèbres. Les interprétations diasporiques de la culture celtique écossaise ont ensuite été réintroduites en Écosse, si bien que celtisme d’origine et celtisme diasporique semblent avoir fusionné. Les diasporas celtiques participent à la survie des identités celtiques en élaborant leurs moyens d’expression. / How have the Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Bretons maintained their Celtic identities over the last three centuries? The Celtic revivals Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and Wales started experiencing in the eighteenth century were not confined to these regions. They were supported by expatriate Celts in London and Paris. The search for a distinct national voice encouraged the Welsh and Bretons, and subsequently the Scots, Irish, Manx and Cornish, to form a pan-Celtic union consolidated by three Celtic congresses. Since the revivals, the Celtic regions have come closer together thanks to the Celtic languages, whose revitalisation has enabled the Celtic cultures to overcome attacks meant to eradicate them. Once regarded as backward, the Celtic tongues have adapted to modernity through the passage to writing and print, and through their extension to new fields. As a bridge between past and present, they form the memory of modern Celticism. Comparatively, Galicia has fused memory and imagination together because it no longer speaks any Celtic language. The Celticity Galicia has fashioned for itself since the mid-nineteenth century has given birth to Galician nationalism, embodied within an autonomous community. Similarly, the six Celtic regions have invented a Celtic ethnicity for themselves, since there is no continuity between the ancient and the modern Celts. The latter have used nationalism to strengthen their distinctiveness from their dominant neighbours. Nationalism has exported Celticism beyond the boundaries of the Celtic regions. Celtic Scottishness results from a partnership between Scotland, the initiator of tartans, clan gatherings and Scottish Gaelic, and North America, which has made these aspects internationally popular. Diasporic versions of Scottish Celtic culture have been introduced into the homeland, so that original and diasporic Celtic Scottishness have blended together. The diaspora Celts give Celtic identities new forms of expression.

This thesis is about the scalar paradoxes of islands as seen through the cultural movement of a small island nation in the nineteenth century. As the divide between Celticism and Teutonism grew in Britain, the cultural movement of the Isle of Man created a hybrid heritage of both. Antiquarians, archaeologists, and cultural activists that were settled in the island organised themselves for the preservation and eventually revitalisation of a Manx past, in communication with scholars in the British Isles and the North. By investigating three major societies from this movement; the Manx Society (1858), the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society (1879) and the Manx Language Society (1899); this thesis follows the development of a national exceptionalism through their selective identification with Nordic, Celtic, and British spaces, caught in between a Western large state ideal of progress and its antithesis: the imaginative geography of an isolated island. Lefebvrian theory shows that their navigation in a past of Celtic settlers and Viking invaders led to a multifunctional transnational history that could be transferred and repurposed for opposing social spaces. It is argued that this transnationalism functioned as cultural shelter, in accordance with how political and economic shelter from larger states has proven successful for small island nations. It shows that if Manx history was to be regarded as a legitimate and valuable addition to the history of nations in the late nineteenth century, it required manifold connections abroad that could be translated to different transnational agendas. And while this type of (trans-) national exceptionalism was adapted to their situation as a small island nation, its inherent co-dependency on transnational connections was only enforcing an inferiority complex within existing hierarchies in Northern European history.

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.” / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate