The Dutch American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Comm ...

Accordingly, newspaper accounts offer historical and contemporary comments on how each festival has changed in regard to its structure, objectives, or effects on the staging community. Each festival has produced a wide range of souvenirs. Holland, Pella, and Orange City each have at least one institution that houses substantial documentation, promotional and otherwise, of each town’s festival. Orange City, Pella, Fulton, and Holland each have museums dedicated, in whole or in part, to the Dutch heritage of each of these communities. Each community has produced numerous photographs and postcards. There is no shortage of people willing to talk to about the local festival to an interested researcher. And, of course, there are the festivals and their elements themselves. While little scholarly literature addresses Dutch-American festivals, the people who organize and perform in these festivals have produced an absolutely immense collection of “texts” concerning their festivals and staging communities. If Dorst is correct that, in a way, the postmodern tendency to produce a massive proliferation of texts about oneself (individual or community) already does what the professional ethnographer is supposed to do, the problem in approaching the five festivals I focus on is not the dearth of material about them, but rather that there is arguably too much material available on one festival alone to adequately process it. An embarrassment of riches is, for the purposes of such a study, preferable to a lack, however, and anyone brash enough to make an entire culture or subculture, even if limited to its celebratory performances, his or her topic is probably doomed to biting off more than what one alone can chew. I therefore refer my readers to the acknowledgments at the beginning of this document and give thanks that I can stand on the shoulders of the scholars discussed to this point.

Apart from literature concerning festivals and celebrations that display ethnicity, there is a growing body of scholarly literature on Dutch immigration to the United States, as well as on the social, cultural, and economic history of Dutch-American communities in the United States. This body of literature has been produced almost exclusively by scholars of Dutch descent, as the relatively small Dutch-American community has not attracted the attention of many researchers from other backgrounds.