The Mark of Scottish America: Heritage Identity and the Tartan Monster

Abstract

Zumkhawala-Cook explores the unusually privileged and problematic place that Scottish cultural heritage inhabits in the field of American identity politics. While the widespread presence of social institutions that sustain and define Scottish identity in the United States—clan societies, Highland festivals, and tartan clubs—seems to indicate an expression of ethnodiasporic community, he argues that Scottish America does not quite constitute an ethnic community organized to promote the material, representational, or legislative interests of Scottish Americans. Nor is this ‘diaspora’ committed, in any meaningful way, to maintaining trans-local cultural or political connections with its homeland, he shows. Devoid of any links to a contemporary existing collectivity in Scotland, Scottish identity in the United States has emerged primarily through expressions of “heritage,” rather than of culture or nation. Heritage, Zumkhawala-Cook argues, promises an individualized devotional relationship to a historic “people,” through genealogy and clan origins, while simultaneously dislodging and detaching identity from any of the histories or politics of migration, dislocation, and cultural loss so often associated with diasporic communities. Relying on fantasies of early Scottish life and individual heroism that are profoundly mediated and enabled by kitsch commodities of “auld” Scottish culture, heritage identity follows in step with global capitalism’s re-articulation of national and ethnic cultural identity as a privately held option for middle-class consumers searching for a loose and depoliticized sense of belonging.