Foreword

Abstract

It would be dull, naïve and outright incorrect to argue that globalisation has, finally, caught up with the Maltese Islands. First, the past is visibly intertwined in the present; and – as the Tico Tico scene above attests – the global is tightly enmeshed in the local. It is true that modernity has the habit of stamping out or replacing lingering vestiges of and from the past. But, the same dynamic of freshness also gifts some (though not all) of these relicts with a new lease of life, reconfiguring them as cool exemplars of culture and heritage that are embraced by locals as beacons of stability in a turbulent ocean of change and insecurity. These ‘identity exponents’ are then consumed and appreciated by visitors and tourists on the look-out for morsels and snippets of authentic difference and exotic peculiarity.