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

As celebrations requiring substantial participation that are specifically staged for an audience (and thus intended to draw attention to the celebrating community) and that transmit particular themes, meanings, messages, and lessons, the five celebrations I am studying can certainly be understood as display events and public events, but they can also be legitimately understood as rites and festivals. Therefore, I will use all four terms throughout this study. In doing so, I acknowledge that the five festivals fit all four definitions and that, moreover, each of these terms is a not-entirely-fixed node on a terminological continuum.

In the midst of all this literature about festivals, heritage, authenticity, ethnicity, and ethnic celebrations, my study offers something of a new and unique direction. In particular, I am taking up the often overlooked topic of Dutch-American heritage celebrations, several of which were among the first to specifically use ethnicity to draw an outside audience to the celebrating community. In other words, three Dutch towns—Holland, Pella, and Orange City—were among the first to put their heritage and ethnicity on display specifically for visitors to the town. Previous studies of Dutch-American heritage celebrations have been a summary overview of such events with limited analysis (Sheeres), focused on a limited time period in an event’s history (Zylstra) or a single element (Van’t Hof on Holland’s klompen dances), or limited themselves to descriptions of how Holland’s Tulip Time has performed and played a role in maintaining a separate Dutch-American identity (Sinke, Che). Although this study cannot hope to analyze each of the many facets of these festivals, it attempts to tie more threads together by analyzing each festival’s history, addressing many different performance elements (parades, plays, pageants, dances, church services, etc.), and more fully elucidating the ties between the immigrant history of each of these communities and the present-day ways in which a separate Dutch-American ethnicity is maintained in each of these towns, and represented (or not) in each celebration. I also go beyond previous studies in several ways. First, I situate these festivals within the wider context of American festivals, rituals, display events, and other celebrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, I attempt to account for the emergence of these festivals in their particular times and places. Third, I investigate the different ways in which authenticity has been understood and employed in each of these festivals.