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King’s Research Portal Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Kirkland, R. (2017). Visualising Peace: Northern Irish Post-conflict Cinema and the Politics of Reconciliation. Review of Irish Studies in Europe , 1(2). Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. 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Sep. 2021 Visualising Peace: Northern Irish Post-conflict Cinema and the Politics of Reconciliation Richard Kirkland The question ‘What does working through the past mean?’ requires explication. It follows from a formulation, a modish slogan that has become highly suspect during the last years. In this usage ‘working through the past’ does not mean seriously working upon the past, that is, through a lucid consciousness breaking its power to fascinate. On the contrary, its intention is to close the books on the past and, if possible, even remove it from memory. The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven, which would be proper for those who suffered injustice, is practiced by those party supporters who committed the injustice.1 Theodor Adorno’s great refusal of the platitudes of reconciliation, delivered as a lecture in 1959 in a West Germany still brutalized by its recent history of Nazism and genocide, continues to exert a powerful influence on the discourses of post-conflict politics. Indeed, the distinction he draws between ‘working through’ and ‘working upon’ the past, although imperfectly rendered in English translation, demarcates one of the central dilemmas in the apprehension of how a reconciliation with historical violence might be achieved. It describes something of the relationship between the immediate needs of the dominant state and those appeals for justice which might be seen to destabilize it, and encompasses the often contingent calls for a strategic amnesia in the post-conflict present in the face of what are often insistent demands for recollection and reparation. More profoundly, if the ‘working through’ that Adorno dismisses seeks, ineffectually, to repress history in the name of a strategically convenient future, the ‘working upon’ that he endorses allows the claims of the dead and the dispossessed to be heard. It is only through such attention, he argues, that we can avoid being endlessly transfixed by a past that will not be silenced, a legacy that the rhetorical mechanics of ‘working through’ will never entirely quell. With its often uncertain post-conflict status, such issues loom large in present-day Northern Ireland, where issues of remembrance and forgetting and the competing claims of the past and the present dominate much of the public discourse on the legacy of the violence and the charting of paths to reconciliation. In complex ways, then, the North provides a vivid illustration of what Cillian McGrattan has described as ‘the simultaneous silencing and revealing that underpins transitional ethnic politics’,2 while revivifying Adorno’s opposition in specific and sometimes bizarre manifestations. Most notable among these effects, as Tom Lodge has identified, is the fact that peace in the North cannot be apprehended as a collective condition leading towards a shared future because of the consociational nature of the settlement. As he notes: it is not designed to facilitate the fostering of a common perception of citizenship among Northern Ireland's inhabitants. The Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin have agreed to shelve their differences about nationhood for the foreseeable future, but this means that 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’ [1959], Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia, 1998), 89. 2 Cillian McGrattan, ‘Policing Politics: Framing the Past in Post-conflict Divided Societies’, Democratization, 21.3 (2014): 402. Review of Irish Studies in Europe 1.2 Richard Kirkland their day-to-day cooperation will always be qualified by the absence of a shared patriotism.3 A recognition of this stark awareness is key to understanding many of the difficulties that legacy and reconciliation projects face in the North as it means that the condition of post- conflict becomes an endless ‘ever-present’ based on the negotiation of contingent ideas of co-existence. As a result, and because the settlement is predicated only very tenuously on any kind of shared future, little desire to create a mutual language or syntax of mediating symbols is identifiable. It is partly because of this reason that the idea of peace in the North is habitually described not as an attainable state or a goal to be achieved, but rather as an on-going process, or narrative, prone to advances and setbacks, and driven by its own unique momentum. This enables the two states that underwrite the process to appear as active agents in the maintenance of the post-conflict condition, intervening where necessary on behalf of what are deemed to be the larger benefits that serve the wider community. ‘Dealing with the past is a process and not an event’, as one British Government-sponsored report on the toxicities of Northern Irish history puts it.4 In many ways this positioning helps to effectively depoliticise the role of the state, but, more importantly, it also insists on a singular narrative, or roadmap, for post-conflict policy that cannot and will not allow for any alternative perspectives. In this formation, individuals and groups are deemed either to be for the process or not, and any alternative means of understanding the relationship between the violent past and the fragile present is rendered implicitly aberrant. Under these conditions any activity close to Adorno’s sense of ‘working on’ the past is likely to be judged potentially subversive or, at the very least, liable to unnecessarily disturb anachronistic passions. To put this differently, the peace process has imposed a structure on the legacy of Northern Ireland’s history which enables it to have a significance for the present, but this legacy can only speak of itself in very circumscribed ways and through a strikingly narrow vocabulary. This article seeks to build upon the range of critical work in this area that has identified the unique contours of the Northern Irish settlement and aims to interrogate some areas of policy and practice that encapsulate its contradictions, silences, and ellipses. Following this it will discuss two recent films, Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008), and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Five Minutes of Heaven (2009), that are in different ways shaped by the peace process as a historical event and which grant its abstract negotiations a material form. These films ultimately endorse, albeit in qualified ways, the peace process as it is currently constituted, but they also demonstrate a willingness to explore alternative ways of imagining the post-conflict condition and the relationship to violence that preceded it. As a result, although both are in many ways unremarkable examples of mainstream cinema, they do not stand squarely within the ideological assumptions of the current settlement, but rather locate themselves at something of a tangent to its frequently unexamined assertions. As I will demonstrate, this positioning creates a series of peculiar ideological effects which cannot be 3 Tom Lodge, ‘Northern Ireland: Between Peace and Reconciliation’, 3 June, 2009, http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/northern-ireland-between-peace-and-reconciliation. Accessed 10 January 2017. 4 Consultative Group on the Past, Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (Belfast: CGP, January 2009), 24. Review of Irish Studies in Europe 1.2 Richard Kirkland resolved as such, but which can be reframed at the level of the aesthetic so as to enable a form of reconciliation to become visible at the films’ conclusions. An important overarching context for the discussion of these issues is provided by Colin Graham’s work on photography in post-conflict Belfast.5 Contemplating the relationship between culture and history in Northern Ireland when viewed through the prism of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Graham observes that in the years leading up to the Agreement culture was frequently identified as a testing ground for the possibility of utopian political alternatives in the North and, with this, a means of by-passing the seemingly obdurate impossibilities of organised politics. As a result, for a period the British Government’s investment in culture as a site of social and political potential in Northern Ireland was highly visible, both through organisations such as the Cultural Traditions Group and documents such as the Downing Street Declaration of 1993.

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