Dark

Tourism: Literary Cartographies

of a post-Troubles Belfast

Denition

Dark tourism, as dened by Phillip Stone, is the act of visiAng

sites associated with death, tragedy or the macabre (109).
In Northern Ireland, it has manifested specically as
Troubles tourism.

Thesis

I will juxtapose the analysis of Troubles tourism as text with

a kind of mirrored tourism that is deployed in the act of
wriAng the city. I aim to unfold the layers of narraAve that
maps onto the spaces of Belfast, and to interrogate the
eects of their convergence in a post-Troubles Belfast.

Space and Narrative

Burton Pikes urban theory of real city and word city

represent the dialecAcs between physical space shaping
story, and story shaping physical space. This intersected
reading blurs the boundaries to enable a quesAoning of
tourisAc narraAves.

Cartography as Language of Space

To move through the streets of Belfast, therefore, is to

negoAate a way through contested maps... These psychic
maps create a divide more solid than the wall separaAng
the Falls from the Shankill. (Higheld 172)

On-the-ground Narratives

In a city that repeatedly appears as either a denatured backdrop or as a theater so exoAcized and dangerous as to deny its ciAzens
normal lives, the carceral streets become, in the words of Aaron Kelly, the arterial occlusions of a terminally aicted heart of
darkness. The cartographic processes at work in the standard Troubles thriller oYen reveal the tension between the stark clarity of
sectarian geographies and a shiYing, insecure spaAal imaginary. EmpAed of their local meanings and largely mysAed from the
perspecAve of the common ciAzen, urban spaces tend nally to deny possibiliAes for negoAated idenAAes or the pursuit of an
ecacious ground-level poliAcs. (Reimer 93)

Belfast needs to be reimagined, not just reimaged (Neill 10).

Nothing about us without us is for us..., a phrase that simply states the kind of reimaginaAon that needs to emanate from the us of
Belfast, not the dead centre of amnesiac aestheAcs. What Northern Irelands contemporary novelists has already started needs to be
passed on to the people of the city. Their word city or spaAal imaginary needs to be reclaimed and they have to be free to traverse
and renegoAate idenAAes.

Coulter, Colin and Murray, Michael. IntroducAon. Northern Ireland A3er the Troubles: A Society in Transi=on. Ed. Colin Coulter and Michael Murray.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 1-26. Print. Higheld, Jonathan. Archaeology of ReconciliaAon: Ciaran Carsons Belfast Confef and
John Kindness Belfast Frescoes. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28:2 - 29:1 (2002-2003): 168-185. JSTOR. Web. Neill, William J.V. Anywhere and
Nowhere: Reimaging Belfast. Fortnight 309 (1992): 8-10. JSTOR. Web. Pa<erson, Glenn. Fat Lad. Belfast: Chajo & Windus, 1992. Print. ---. Number 5.
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Print. Reimer, Eric. The Extraordinary Ordinariness of Robert McLiam Wilsons Belfast. ire-Ireland 45:1&2 (2010):
89-110. JSTOR. Web. Stone, P.R. Consuming Dark Tourism: a call for research. eReview of Tourism Research 3:5 (2005): 109-117. InsAtute for Dark
Tourism Research. Web. Wilson, Robert McLiam. Eureka Street. London: Vintage, 1998. Print.

Carmen Thong K.M.Thong@warwick.ac.uk

English and Comparative Literary Studies
Supervisor: Dr. Pablo Mukherjee

TitnTan. He drew a scroll

around it, like the scrolls youd
see on paramilitary wall
pain8ngs right across the city,
like we were a two-man army
ourselves. FTA, he wrote
underneath. Fuck them all.
(Pa$erson2004, 126)

The ocial Liverpool shop

is the site of one of the
most devasta8ng bombings
at the height of the
Troubles. However, no
memorial or indica8on of
the event can be seen in
the space.

Their [the locals] Belfast has

to be armed to achieve real
reconcilia8on. Contemporary
Northern Irish novels have
begun to do this. The
characters in these novels
tend to live in a mys8ed
Belfast, and they struggle -
without anything like the
grand name of principle
(Wilson 381) - to nd the
language to talk about the
Belfast that they know day by
day.

The narra8ves of progress

that oRen inform ocial
discourse on Northern Ireland
are undermined further... the
ins8tu8ons and processes
presuppose that people in
Northern Ireland can mobilize
poli8cally only as unionists and
na8onalistsThe eect of the
Belfast Agreement has,
therefore, been to reproduce
and legi8mate many of those
forms of ethno-poli8cal
feeling that sparked the
Northern Irish conict in the
rst place (Coulter 15).

The toxins that cannot be

disposed from the main
body through meaningful
discourse has been
pumped into the already
raw and swollen arteries
that is west Belfast, which
kickstarts a process of re-
solidifying sectarian place
iden88es.

Even if East Belfast has even

more murals along the main
road, visitors are never
brought on tours there. The
fact that the Troubles exists
very much in the present in
East Belfast makes
museumiza8on dicult.

The city centre entered into

a new post-modernist
aesthe8cs that seek to
induce historical
amnesia (Neill 9).
A few of the sights. Drew brought the teacup to his mouth, surprised to discover that he
s8ll harboured something of the old suspicion of these words; the distaste for tourists,
common to those of his background, who knew that all too oRen seeing a few of the
sights involved nothing more than a ghoulish fairground ride up the Shankill and down the
Falls, gawping at murals and for8ed bars, having the poten8ally life-saving nuances of
the rival black taxi services explained and a murderous signicance ascribed to every
street corner, public house and patch of waste ground. The this was where and the over
there of twenty years of violence... go looking in any direc8on other than narrowly west in
Belfast to nd a dierent city altogether. (Pa_erson 1992, 224)