ABSTRACT
The year 2009, the “Year of Homecoming” in Scotland, was designed to highlight “Scotland’s great contributions to the world”: whisky, golf, ancestry, innovators, and, of course, its national poet, who was marking his 250th anniversary. 1 As part of its global campaign, Homecoming Scotland, the organization responsible for encouraging Scots and Scotophiles to visit Scotland during the year, sponsored a virtual “World Famous Burns Supper” in partnership with the Famous Grouse Whisky Company with a website that tracked Burns Night celebrations around the globe. Anyone holding a Burns celebration on 25 January 2009 was encouraged to “complete our simple two-step registration to ... become part of the World’s largest ever Burns Night celebration!” 2 The website featured an interactive “Global Hosts Map” with 3,673 pinpointed sites, mostly clustered in Great Britain and North America, but with examples from as far away as Azerbaijan and Zimbabwe. The technology used to represent this “World Famous Burns Supper”—Google Maps—was new. But the sentiment behind it—creating a sense of connectedness between Burns enthusiasts from different locations around the world—actually dates back 150 years earlier to the first centenary celebration of Burns’s birth. 3 While Burns served as symbol of Scottish identity for Scots at home and abroad before 1859, the centenary served to globalize Burns, drawing on the new technologies of the time in order to represent him as a modern phenomenon linking individuals around the world. 4 At the same time as it promised to unite different groups in an international celebration, however, the centenary also made it apparent that “Burns” could look very different depending on which side of the Atlantic he was being toasted. In Virtual Americas, Paul Giles examines “the ways specific local conditions and cultural landscapes reconstitute transnational networks in different ways.” 5 The Burns Centenary offers a unique opportunity to consider how the “local conditions” influencing the representation of one particular literary figure at one particular time “reconstitute” transatlantic networks. Building on the work of Giles, this chapter examines the discourse surrounding the centenary events, suggesting the way in which Burns served in 1859, not only as a “mediator between memory communities” on either side of the Atlantic, to invoke Ann Rigney’s theories regarding cultural memory, 6 but also as a marker of local, national and transatlantic differences.
