Belfast Imaginary: Place, Performance and the new Northern Irish Identity
The following was presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 20, 2019.
In January 2018, while ambling along the Royal Avenue in Belfast[1], I began to notice a series of banners celebrating the iconic Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Strange, I noted in my journal, I wonder what Belfast’s claim to Burns could be? Though he never traveled here, the Belfast-Burns connection is not exactly specious. Scotland and Ireland share Gaelic linguistic and cultural roots and a long history of cross migration. In all, four different banner designs marked out a half-life of cultural influence, from 1787, when the first edition of his poetry printed outside of Scotland was published in Belfast, to 1872, when Belfast’s first (and still surviving) Burns appreciation society was founded. The banners advertised a week-long festival program presented by the Ulster-Scots Agency and Belfast Burns Association planned to coincide with the poet’s 259th birthday.[2] At an average cost of £131 for design, manufacture, and installation and £4/day for the “rental” of each street lamp they adorn[3], not to mention the cost of the program itself, a campaign of this scale is no accidental endeavor, entailing the work of many cultural organizations, artists, and scholars, and requiring approval by multiple local planning and tourism agencies.
I mention this because Belfast is a place where banners matter; where the colors and images that hang from poles, brighten the sides of buildings and color the curbstones are always the object of intense scrutiny. Countless pages of research and legislation address the contested symbols of the Northern Irish Troubles and enormous amounts of state and international funding—the so-called peace dividends—have been devoted to rebranding the public space—from the removal and replacement of contentious symbols, the installation of new public art, to the invention of new structures of public celebration. Thus the presence of the Burns Banners in Belfast’s city center—unremarkable though it may seem—places a Scottish Icon in a place of privilege within the material and moral landscape of the Northern Irish capital. How does this subtle cue in the visual landscape reflect the changing nature of place in Northern Ireland? This paper will explore interactions between the ongoing process of place-making in Belfast, and the recent events of Brexit.
For the past two decades, local understandings of place were brokered through the political/historical framework of the Troubles and ensuing peace process, with its orientation toward Europe as a source of funding and model of community-in-diversity. But in the current climate of Euroskepticism and Britain’s looming departure from the EU, a new rhetorical framework provides the context for the ongoing work of urban development and transformation and sets the stage for a crisis of urban identity. I will argue that as the historical events of Brexit shift the rhetorical and conceptual frames through which place is understood, so too the processes of place-making, the human activity that produces space, must shift. In Belfast this has entailed a symbolic reorientation from Europe back toward the British Isles, and a strategic forgetting of the sources of division stemming from within the broader “British” state.
Place-making, or the social production of space, refers to the conscious and creative activity of human beings to construct and socialize the spaces they inhabit, a discursive and recursive process of imbuing generic, undifferentiated “space” with meaning and moral value (Tuan 1977, Lefebvre 1991). Though social space is the inevitable product of situated social activity, I have argued (2013, 2015) that place-making is an intentional enterprise, through which people challenge and reinvent the conventions of their social worlds through imaginative play and the semiotic flooding of key public spaces.
In Belfast, one of the many forms that place-making may take is that of the parade. Both Loyalist and Republic commemorations have been understood through territorial frameworks as appropriations of space (Daniel 1984, Santino 2001), With marchers typically carrying controversial symbols across conventional boundaries, these events are confrontational by design and effect (Bryne 2005, Bryan 1998, Jarman 1997, Jarman and Bryan 1996, 1998). Yet the city’s civic parades—events like the Lord Mayor’s Show and St. Patrick’s Day Carnival--are explicitly designed to contravene such associations. Funded by the city and international sources, these events are mandated, both by peace policy and funding arrangements to occur in neutral spaces and to promote a “shared culture” among all of Belfast’s residents (Keenan 2013). Thus the civic parade inverts the traditional form of the parade, from an assertion of a unique cultural identity, to an explicit demonstration of unity in diversity.
Considering parades through Dean MacCannell’s theory of cultural production provides a useful lens for understanding why these are important objects of inquiry. As Cultural Productions parades are structures existing in the public domain that contain “somewhat fictionalized, idealized or exaggerated models of social life” (2013: 24). Such productions amplify idealized beliefs about people and place through the heightened emotional affect of collective performance (MacCannell 24, see also Durkheim!) In Northern Ireland, an idealized past often becomes fodder for such performances, presenting “aspirational” visions of local identity (Donnan and Wilson 2006: 103). As participatory, embodied activities, parades also challenge conventions of space and place through the collective presence of human beings executing a shared purpose. Judith Butler writes in her recent Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) that “We miss something of the point of these public demonstrations if we fail to see that the very public character of [a] space is being disputed, and even fought over, when crowds gather” (2015: 71). Whereas Butler’s starting point are mass demonstrations of protest and resistance, which communicate an assertion of right through the presence of marginalized bodies in the public sphere, her argument applies also to parades, which are produced by organizing bodies and sanctioned by municipal oversight: conceptualizations of “the public” must from time to time be asserted by the outpouring of “the people” into public space, and who appears within such an assembly may either confirm or challenge local conceptions of community. But it is worth noting that in contrast to Butler’s radical democratic vision of public assembly, MacCannell also argues governments “at all levels and of all types” are increasingly vested in controlling the production of cultural experiences (25).
Nothing could be more true in Belfast, where both the local municipality and overarching state governments have an interest in crafting a model of social life no longer characterized by conflict. Thus a parade, which is an assemblage of icons, symbols, and human bodies, that moves through space, “makes place” in three distinct, but interconnected ways. Firstly, it claims space, asserting the legitimacy and moral value of its content—whatever that may be—by occupying and transgressing the public domain. Secondly, through the symbolism of its visual and dramatic components, it inscribes a vision of a cultural ideal into people’s memories and associations with place. Finally, through the sheer presence of human bodies, both as performers and audience, it creates and defines the public to which it is addressed.
So, while the civic parades I studied in Belfast were uncontroversial in the sense that they intentionally affected a performance of peace-in-diversity, they nonetheless functioned in much the same way to occupy and transgress public space, occupying it with a particular, idealized vision of Belfast while temporarily erasing others. Take, for example, the 2011 St. Patrick’s Day Carnival. Set to the theme “Green for Recycling” the organizers, BEAT Carnival Arts, would raise awareness of the City’s new recycling initiatives by creating costumes and floats to embody creative reuse and humorous takes on good environmental practice. Mascot “litterbugs” were chased by “Litterbins,” styled after Belfast’s council-issue black and gold garbage cans; Two superheroes waved at children: “Green Girl” and a muscled, blue-caped, “Captain Cleanup”, sporting the Belfast City Council logo on his chest. BEAT artists also created costumed characters who represented the theme—“Street Sweeper Sue,” a broom pusher with attitude, two fashion queens in dresses made of newspaper and plastic bags, and “Marigold Molly,” whose coat bloomed with flowers made of plastic bottles. The BEAT’s builders also created a human-sized hamster wheel, mounted on a stripped car chassis, which was powered by the 2010 Belfast marathon winners, and a pedal-powered, cartoonish, street-cleaning van, which chased performers along the parade route.
The event was widely celebrated for its inclusivity; Beat organizers achieved record numbers of Protestant participants, and drew performing groups from all around the city, including multicultural groups such as the South Belfast “Friendship Club” and Inclusive Neighborhood Project, both of which support migrants and refugees. The end result, however, was an event celebrating St. Patrick in name only; the event staff went so far as to replace Irish Tricolors with paper shamrock flags, and banned sporting apparel which could be read by locals as sectarian. Thus stripped of every explicit reference to Catholicism or the Irish Republic, the event became something more explicitly “Of Belfast,” with its floats depicting the famous Harland and Wolf shipyard cranes, and marchers wearing papier-mâché city halls As one spectator put it, “It is an international recognition of St. Patrick and Belfast. We are sometimes in the media for the wrong reasons [but] this should become us…. It is a glimpse of a better future where we love and use our city streets for the right reasons” (March 17, 2011). (The implication being that it is actually morally unacceptable, according to this viewer, to use the streets to assert a sectarian or national identity.)
It took years of advocacy, and policy-mandated loosening of restrictions on public assembly following the Good Friday Agreement, for celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day to be integrated into the Belfast’s official public culture. Even then, symbols of Irish Nationalism—in particular the green-white-and-gold tricolor flag—were still perceived by many Protestant Unionists as subversive, anti-government agitation. Despite the fact that Loyalists could march boisterously through the city center every July 12th, signing battle hymns against the “Papacy,” symbols of Irishness remained threatening to the Agreement’s call for “Good Relations,” largely because of their association with anti-state paramilitaries. It was only by co-opting St. Patrick’s Day as a celebration of civic pride, and replacing St. Patrick’s snakes and shamrocks with symbols of Belfast’s multi-cultural urbanism, that the event could move from the Catholic periphery into the city center, and be integrated into Belfast’s annual structure of civic celebration. Whereas before 2006, when the event was first officially sponsored by the Belfast City Council, St. Patrick’s Day marches more closely represented assertions of identity and presence, ala Butler, by 2008, when the BEAT took over as organizers, St. Patrick’s day had been fully transformed into a representation of a local civic ideal that can only tolerate a sanitized version of diversity, one that does little to offend the Protestant mainstream.
The inoffensive imperative is not merely a capitulation to local sensitivities, but a key feature of post-conflict cultural policy and public discourse that has dominated processes of cultural production in Belfast for the past 25 years. In that time, Belfast policy makers have often looked to the European Union as a model of unity-in-diversity. Europe’s particular rhetoric of integration stressed “the reality of Europe as a cultural entity,” with a pan-European identity that negates divisions between ethnic and national modes of belonging and encourages Europeans to “imagine themselves as resembling or replacing one another” (Borneman and Folwler 1997: 490). This same logic finds expression in Northern Ireland in a vast array of policy documents and funding schemes from the 1994 ceasefires onward. In fact the ceasefires initiated a massive—and continuing—and continuing flow of money into the Northern Irish peace process when then EC President Jacques Delors set up the Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation, later known as PEACE I. That five-year disbursement of almost £400 million was targeted directly at cross-community cooperative programs—like the BEAT’s St. Patrick’s Day Carnvial, that deliberately bypassed government and party channels, and provided the rhetorical and material conditions for peace-building work in Northern Ireland (McSweeny 1998: 99). Now in its fourth installment, the PEACE Programme continues to fund development projects that create “shared spaces” and entail sustained, cooperative contact between people of different backgrounds. The central mechanism both for EU funding schemes and Northern Irish policy is the “good relations” rule, enshrined the 1998 agreement and ensuing Northern Ireland Act, that requires all public authorities to “have regard to the desirability of promoting good relations between persons of different religious belief, political opinion, or racial group”( Section 75 (2)). Through these direct and indirect lines, the EU reproduced its pan-European identity in the North by using grant applications and the promise of financial “peace dividends” to enforce “the saccharin concept of ‘unity in diversity’” (Borneman and Fowler 1997: 495).
Yet, returning to Belfast in January 2018, I learned that the BEAT had just lost its annual tender for the St. Patrick’s Day event to a “rival” arts production company, Féile an Phobail, which had also recently published a report claiming that Belfast’s current St Patrick’s Day celebrations “lack ambition.” The report, presented to the City Council, recommended greater investment and corporate partnerships that would allow Belfast to “go on to rival some of the largest cities in the world with a new, ambitious and economically-driven St. Patrick’s Day Festival."[4] Calling on parades in New York, Dublin and Birmingham (England) as models, the report ignores the delicate balance that organizations like the BEAT have threaded over the years in drawing different religious communities and political rivals together over the shared experience of performance. Rather than emphasize the parade as a product of citizen collaboration, an event that builds community in defiance of the legacy of conflict, the Féile Report presented St. Patrick’s Day as a product for tourist consumption and makes no mention of the Troubles or the challenges of expanding St. Patrick’s Day offerings--which by necessity include the observance of symbols still very much associated with anti-state paramilitaries. The BEAT’s skeleton staff, those that remain after a series of funding cuts, move forward planning events outside the city center, retreating from the cross-community work that for so many years was not only a core part of their mission, but also an essential necessity for their funding applications. With the move toward a more commercialized St. Patrick’s Day the BEAT’s director sees the city’s priorities shifting away from inclusivity and diversity, toward a vision of Belfast, to cite the Féile Report “connected, culturally vibrant, loved by all its citizens, and free from the legacy of conflict”.[5]
To understand this shift, we must consider how the rhetorical frameworks in which Belfast’s placemaking is embedded have also shifted. A frame, according to Erving Goffman, is the background information, or interpretive schema, that allows individuals to “locate, perceive, identify and label”—that is make sense of—the occurrences of daily life (Goffman 1974: 21). While frames provide pragmatic, operational knowledge, informing individuals how to relate, react and present themselves to one another within various social contexts (Buckley and Kenney 1995), they also contain ideological schema. Such “rhetorical frameworks” are representational models of reality through which symbolic discourse derives meaning and value (Buckley and Kenney 1995). While the narrative of the peace process dominated the work of cultural production in Belfast for over 20 years, the seeds of Euroskeptism and backlash against European multiculturalism have been rising recently to the surface.
A key turning point occurred in 2012, when the Belfast City Council voted to fly the Union Flag over City Hall only 18 days per year. Street protests and riots ensued, with Orange leaders calling the move a “war to erode all symbols of Britishness”[6]. The protests continued over the course of a year, taking up other issues related to Unionist grievances, along with other symbols belonging to banned paramilitary groups. In late 2012 David Cameron, responding to mounting pressure within his party, the UK independence movement and the EU sovereign debt crisis, promised to work to renegotiate Britain’s role in the EU and to begin legislation toward holding a referendum on EU membership.[7] With the vote occurring in June 2016, the UK elected to leave the European Union by a margin of less than 4%--In Northern Ireland a minority 44% voted to go.
Thus given a name, the rhetoric of “Brexit” changes the frame in which the creative and productive work of place-making occurs. Though the business of daily life tends to go on irrespective of the day’s political crises, the growing discourse around Brexit makes it impossible not to “read” current events through this new interpretive schema. The material conditions of this current moment are also different--while the EU still provides PEACE IV funding to cross-community work, the Conservative government’s ongoing austerity measures—which responded in part to the European debt crisis, have dramatically shrunken Northern Ireland’s funding for the arts. It is within this context that artists and community organizers must to situate their work, and continue to negotiate creative visions for Belfast’s future with the policy makers in the ever ongoing work of creating “place.”
Though my visit in 2018 was too short to draw firm conclusions about the interpretive schema that dominate today’s processes of place-making in Belfast, it does seem clear that the long narrative of the Troubles and the Peace Process no longer helps to describe and situate the tourist attractions that take center stage, the work of artists and activists, and the new policy frameworks that shape the city’s development. The Burns Banners surprised me because I was still thinking about Belfast in these terms, in which a lionized Scottish poet had no place, though he had long been appreciated here. Likewise, The Féile report promises a commodifiable and uniquely “Beal Feirstian” vision of Irishness that flouts the cross-community imperatives of the Peace Process, not because it rejects the principles of the Good Friday Agreement, but because in today’s UK, radical assertions of local identity carry greater moral weight. When the 2020 St. Patrick’s Day parade occurs, it will be worth noting whether the old fears of Irish Nationalism rear their heads in the reactions of the press and pundits. As we watch “Brexit” unfold, it is worth thinking not just how this will impact trade and borders, but how individuals and communities must now begin to re-negotiate their place within the UK.
References
Borneman, John and Nick Fowler
1997 Europeanization. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 487-514.
Bryan, Dominic
1998 ‘Ireland’s very own Jurassic Park’: the mass media Orange Parades and the Discourse on Tradition. In Symbols in Northern Ireland. Anthony D. Buckley, ed. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies.
2000 Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control. London: Pluto Press.
Bryne, Jonny
2005 Interface Violence in East Belfast during 2002: the Impact on residents of Short Strand and Inner East Belfast. Belfast: Institute for Conflict Research.
Buckley, Anthony D. and Mary Catherine Kenney
1995 Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Drama in Northern Ireland. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Butler, Judith
2015 Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Daniel, E. Valentine
1984 Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Durkheim, Emile
1995 [1912] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Karen E. Fields, Trans. New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, Erving
1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of. Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jarman, Neil
1997 Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg.
Jarman, Neil and Dominic Bryan
1996 Parade and Protest: a Discussion of Parading Disputes in Northern Ireland. Coleraine: Center for the study of Conflict, University of Ulster.
1998 Riots to Rights: Nationalist Parades in the North of Ireland. Coleraine: University of Ulster Press.
Keenan, Katharine
2013 Imagining a New Belfast: Municipal Parades in Urban Regeneration [Dissertation] New York City: Columbia University
2015 ‘St. Patrick’s Day Becomes Us’: A New Parade for a New Belfast. In Consuming St. Patrick’s Day, Pp. 114-131. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lefebvre, Henri.
1991 [1974] The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
MacCannell, Dean
2013 [1999] The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
McSweeny, Bill
1998 Identity, Interest and the Good Friday Agreement. Irish Studies in International Affairs 9: 93-102.
Santino, Jack
2001 Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland. Hampshire: Palgrave.
Tuan, Yi-Fu
1977 Space and Place, the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan
2006 The Anthropology of Ireland. New York: Berg.
[1] My last visit to Belfast, described in this opening passage occurred 8 months before the devastating Bank Buildings fire, which has permanently altered the appearance of Belfast’s city center. This paper will not address the fire, or its effects on Belfast’s visual landscape, but any understanding of Belfast’s ongoing development must take the efforts to preserve the Bank Buildings and the character of Belfast’s historic shopping district into account.
[2] https://www.ulsterscotsagency.com/news/article/276/belfast-burns-week-2018/, retrieved 9/3/2019 https://www.ulsterscotsagency.com/what-is-ulster-scots/burns-night/ retrieved 9/3/2019
[3] Costs based on 2011 estimates: https://minutes3.belfastcity.gov.uk/documents/s13820/CITY_DRESSING_PLAN_2012_TO_2013.pdf retrieved 9/9/2019 . The advertising campaign was designed in 2016 by Belfast-Based marketing company ImageZoo, https://www.imagezoo.eu/single-post/2016/1/11/ULSTER-SCOTS-CITY-DRESSING) retrieved 9/9/2019
[4] https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/expansion-urged-for-belfasts-unambitious-st-patricks-day-festival-824111.html Retrieved 9/3/19
[5] https://minutes3.belfastcity.gov.uk/documents/s69524/Appendix%201%20-%20St%20Patricks%20Day%20Report%20002.pdf, Retrieved 9/18/19
The Report here cites a new strategic plan for 2035 entitled “The Belfast Agenda.” https://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/council/Communityplanning/BelfastAgenda.aspx Retrieved 9/18/19
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-23267038 9/17/2019
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jul/01/david-cameron-europe-referendum-noncommittal 9/17/2019