“Diverse Scotlands” is inspired by Scotland’s outsized role in the history of British imperial expansion, by its own vexed status as a “postcolonial” colony within the imperial fold, and by its current incarnation as an increasingly heterogenous society that nonetheless embraces a “Scottish” civic identity. Added to the upcoming re-vote on Scottish independence and the marked absence of any discussion of the role that Gaelic might play in an independent Scotland, the panel’s focus on the intersection of language, history, and national identity is in keeping with the broader resonances of the convention’s focus on multilingualism.

Any discussion of Scottish diversity arguably begins with Scotland’s complex language politics, which are exemplified by the division between Lowland Scots and Highland Gaelic. The linguistic divide echoed political and economic tensions that would reverberate for centuries, and which was vividly explored in the literature of Walter Scott and James Hogg, among others. This schism can be further mapped onto Scotland’s role in the expansion of the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wherein Lowland Scots had substantial investment in the global imperial economy while dispossessed and impoverished Scottish Highlanders formed the core of the imperial armies in North America, South Africa, India. These tensions resulted in complex attitudes around the creation of diasporic Scottish communities. The novelist John Galt, who founded Guelph and Goderich, was keenly aware of the impact that colonization would have on indigenous Canadian communities, a situation that haunts his literary explorations of his own beleaguered Scottish Presbyterian history.

The above history of linguistic, religious, and national identity contextualizes the diverse Scotlands represented by the 12-14 minute papers in this panel. The panel begins with Ellen Beard’s paper on Gaelic musical responses to the 1746 Disclothing Act, a punitive measure enacted by the British Parliament after the disastrous Jacobite rebellion in 1746. While the Disclothing Act was uniformly vilified by Gaelic poets of all political and religious stripes, the focus of their criticism was not identical. For Jacobite poets, anger at the Disclothing Act led directly to calls for a new rising to support the legitimate Stewart kings. In contrast, poets from Hanoverian clans emphasized the unfairness of imposing equal penalties on both loyalists and rebels, but all resented the enforced loss of their distinct Gaelic identity.

The panel’s second paper, by Philip Zapkin, explores the contemporary resonances of Scotland’s colonial history. Reading Aileen Ritchie’s 1999 play The Juju Girl, Zapkin argues that the play interrogates stories Scots tell about their relation to colonialism, both about being a kind of internal English colony and about missionary work as a form of charity. Reading the Scottish characters’ responses to the African peoples they encounter while on a backpacking trip, Zapkin demonstrates how the play raises questions about the Scottish preference for seeing themselves as victims of English colonialism rather than perpetrators of British colonialism.

Moving away from colonial history, Robert Morace’s paper turns to the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain, and considers what the critical and commercial success of a gay, Bildungsroman, diaspora, family novel says about the state, or states, of the Scottish novel today. Morace argues that, in the United States, Shuggie Bain has been read not only apart from Scottish Independence, the controversial “Glasgow effect,’ and the lads-behaving-badly Trainspotting school but from within the safe confines of the up-from-poverty Horatio Alger myth of secular salvation. The novel’s reception plays with, or off, other stereotypes: for the thrifty Scot, the ever-generous Stewart; for the head-banging skinhead, the soft-spoken author; and for Kelman’s and Irvine Welsh’s demotic prose, Stewart’s impeccable, at times excessively literary, dialect-light style—less a ‘cheap holiday in other people’s misery’, than a highly, if strangely, literary one.

The panel’s final paper recovers the forgotten history of Scottish Antarctic exploration. Ellen Frye’s paper on the 1902-04 Scottish National Antarctic Exploration considers the impressive scholarly contributions of Scots during the era of nationalist polar expeditions. Drawing from a variety of documents, including Life in the Antarctic, The Voyage of the “Scotia”: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration in the Antarctic Seas, ships’ logs, and sailors’ diaries, Frye examines these texts’ disparate opinions and impressions of Antarctica, establishing the significance of the Scottish presence on Antarctica. Frye also weaves together the history of Scottish polar expeditions and the importance of polar literary criticism in an age of climate crisis. Collectively, panelists draw upon a variety of genres to explore the complex nature of Scottish identity in diverse communities throughout the world.