‘The living flag of Andrew scattered all across the Earth’: Scottish Identity and Diasporic Literature, post-1960

Abstract

The following thesis considers the ways in which diasporic engagement with, and vision of, Scotland – as distant homeland, ambivalent inheritance, or cultural archive – is mobilised in order to legitimise or interrogate settler belonging. Adopting a conceptual, case study methodology to address four nations – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Argentina – with organisations of political, commercial, and cultural authority founded on Scots institutional models and intellectual traditions, this analysis addresses the intersections between diasporic cultural practice and settler structures of power. Locating diasporic literary production within the post-1960 period of global reassessments of belonging and tradition, and the contemporaneous rise of cultural nationalism initiatives across differing geopolitical contexts, this study charts the ways diasporic authors of Scottish descent confronted, engaged with, or appropriated aspects of their Scottish heritage as a means of garnering narrative and political authority. The post-1960 era sees Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Argentina engaged in variegated processes of state-formation and (re)articulation of national culture. Such synthetic nationalisms on behalf of settler states, meanwhile, were occurring alongside the development and internationalisation of Indigenous rights movements and sovereignty claims, which continued to challenge settler legitimacy, and contest what may constitute a ‘national’ story. This project illustrates how Scotland’s cultural capital is deployed, resisted, or reconfigured by contemporary settler authors as they respond to and participate in the shifting geopolitical landscape of the period – amid growing reassessment of colonial histories of conquest – and the concurrent state-sanctioned initiatives of nation-building. By addressing the cultural nationalism projects of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Argentina, this thesis demonstrates how Scotland’s exported systems of cultural authority continued to operate in the post-1960 period, as its cultural histories become strategically coopted by settler societies for the reforging of diasporic and national identities, in light of contemporary pressures. The tracing of the Scottish ‘cultural thread’ across diverse geopolitical settler contexts reveals both the extent to which diasporic literatures interconnect via aspects of shared mythopoetics and intellectual frameworks, as well as the global reach and evolution of Scotland’s cultural influence and its role in the legacies of empire.