From Postcolonial to Post-Agreement: Theorising Northern Ireland’s Negative Liminality

Abstract

As we enter the second decade after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, it is becoming increasingly clear that internal divisions, communal strife and periodic outbreaks of violence in Northern Ireland have not fully abated. Instead, the failed legacies of the Agreement have found a renewed expression in the domains of art, literature and cultural politics. For instance, not only did the post-Agreement period see a meteoric rise in the country’s literary output, but it marked the advent of a new generation of writers who approached the conflict with an entirely new corpus of political and cultural sensibilities. This chapter aims to develop a discursive platform that helps diagnose the political predicaments of post-Agreement Northern Ireland at large, and in doing so, it attempts to forge the means of new conceptual possibilities and perspectives into the literary texts and contexts that represent them. Arguing that both plantation and partition have had far-reaching impacts on the outbreak of political violence in the late 1960s, the chapter engages with the implications of British colonialism to post-Agreement politics, which requires a critical examination of Northern Ireland’s place in postcolonial discourse. By situating Northern Ireland in the broader geopolitical framework of an unfinished colonialism, the chapter examines how the various claims and counterclaims over its geopolitical and territorial mapping have gradually (d)evolved into a geo-ideological conflict of contested identities. Within this, the concept of negative liminality is introduced as the exegeses of Northern Ireland’s transition from a geopolitical to a geo-ideological domain of conflictual identities. Extending the theoretical discussion to the post-Agreement era, the chapter presents a critical reading of the Agreement text which provides the basis for a temporal articulation of negative liminality through two interrelated concepts: liminal suspension and liminal permanence. If negative liminality helps articulate the postcolonial geo-ideological coordinates of Northern Ireland, then liminal suspension and liminal permanence link the structural trajectory of postcolonialism to the post-Agreement period.