Post-Melancholia Belfast: Street Art, Tourism, and the Contested Visions of a Wounded City

Abstract

This essay explores the numerous roles that visual art plays for tourism in various Belfast neighborhoods. In the commercial districts of City Centre, Cathedral Quarter, and the Titanic Quarter, street art and other tourist attractions like the Titanic Museum offer a sanitized past or ignore the city’s troubled history altogether. In the working-class districts of North, East, and West Belfast, political murals mark territories and serve as ceaseless reminders of Northern Ireland’s sectarianism by either lionizing one’s own side and/or vilifying the other. However, despite these vastly different visions of Belfast found in white-collar tourist districts and working-class communities, they all remain mired in a post-colonial melancholia, which Paul Gilroy defines as a psychic defense mechanism that post-colonial nations engage in that prevents a reckoning with its settler-colonial practices and the trauma produced upon those it ruled over. The political murals manufacture an idealized, heroic past that never existed. The street art looks toward an undefined future with often abstract or cartoonish imagery. But neither address the present post-colonial melancholy whereby Northern Ireland’s colonial legacy and the Troubles are either completely ignored or represented in idealized representations.