Living in the Time of the State: Border Temporalities in the Northern Irish Borderlands
Abstract
In dialogue with Sarah Green’s concepts of “traces” and “tidemarks”, as well as a notion of “storytelling”, and Michel de Certeau’s allusion to “ghosts”, I revisit the Irish borderlands more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. I show how everyday life in these borderlands (still) locates in border temporalities articulated as the continual drawing of lines, deeply embedding what I call “the time of the state”. The lines of division and belonging narrate in relation to two periods of time: the Troubles and the island’s British imperial past, appearing materially in the landscape and cityscapes with an ever-present rearticulation of physical divisions by walls and fences and related symbolism, informing and ordering everyday practice. In these borderlands it is not just the popular storytelling about the conflicts that survives, but also a multiplicity of practices associated with them, dividing the population and turning the landscape ghostlike as supposedly past conflicts continue to haunt the everyday lives of people living there.
Keywords: Northern Ireland; traces of lines; tidemarks; ghostly traces; practice-oriented approach.
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