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

Fourth, I examine the rhetoric³ employed in various elements from each celebration (especially tours), as well as in each celebration’s press coverage and promotional materials. Fifth, I base my research on ethnographic interviews and observation, as well as on documentary research. Finally, I scrutinize each celebration for themes, meanings, messages, and lessons presented in each festival, as well as for the discontinuities or disagreements manifested in each celebration.

Beyond content, this study offers something new and different in terms of structure. Previous studies of similar displays of ethnic heritage have tended to intensively study one celebration in one community alone (Danielson, Hoelscher, Graden, Zarilli and Neff, Swiderski, Silverman, Cronin and Adair), or compare two celebrations from communities with different ethnic backgrounds (Hoelscher and Ostergren). John Bodnar’s Remaking America and Collective Memory and Ethnic Groups compares several different celebrations both within and across community and ethnic lines, but each celebration is only treated briefly and, in Remaking America, all of the celebrations studied are cited in service to Bodnar’s overarching theses regarding the changes in public commemoration over the course of the twentieth century he detects (namely that local articulations of public memory and commemoration have been increasingly replaced by national articulations of public memory and commemoration). In this study, however, I seek to open new ground by intensively comparing and contrasting multiple display events celebrated by communities that share a common ethnic heritage and, as chapter 2 shall demonstrate, a rather coherent, close-knit subculture. These five events will be studied both in the present and past, and the conclusion will address questions and concerns the celebrating communities have about the future of their festivals. Throughout this study, rather than imposing my own perspectives and theoretical models on each of these celebrations, I attempt, as far as possible, to let the “texts” produced by organizers and actors, as well as the organizers and actors themselves, speak for themselves.