Performing Memory and Securitization in Belfast

Abstract

This chapter concerns a documentary fiction composed of words and photographs, in which relationships are established between ‘time’, ‘memory’, ‘security’ and ‘Europe’ in the context of the aftermath of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Specifically, I consider the ways in which speech-acts articulated during commercial and non-commercial ‘Troubles tours’ of Belfast form part of a collection of utterances—affirmations, contradictions and so on—that continues to collectively fashion the meaning and memory of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (and elsewhere) at the level of the so-called ‘everyday’. It is the complicated, often contradictory relationship between ‘official’ discourse—constituted by, for example, the 1998 Belfast Agreement—and discourse articulated in the context of the ‘everyday’, that is the immediate point of focus in The De-securitization of Belfast