The Art of War: Instability, Insecurity, and Ideological Imagery in Northern Ireland's Political Murals, 1979-1998 (original) (raw)
2013, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
This article examines the purpose behind, and rhetorical content of, political wall murals produced during the troubles in Northern Ireland. I utilize a semiotic approach to analyze the ways that the symbolic content and physical placement of Northern Irish murals was used by actors on both sides of the conflict. I examine the major thematic traditions utilized by muralists on each side and situate them within the historical and political contexts of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This approach highlights the ways that murals did more than simply champion ideological causes, as earlier scholarship has argued, but served an active role in efforts to catalyze cultural support for organizations' political goals. I argue that murals played a key role for organizations on both sides of the conflict, as they each struggled to craft a communal self-identification and legitimizing central narrative that furthered their ideological goals. Organizations on both sides used murals to mobilize cultural support for their political and military struggles. In this regard, murals functioned as a form of mythic speech, attempting to depoliticize highly political ideologies and make the rhetoric used by the competing groups seem natural and pure. The grassroots nature of the mural traditions is particularly telling in this regard, exposing the deep-seated insecurity of organizations on both sides. This insecurity is further reflected by, and served as a catalyst for, the paramilitary violence that was a defining characteristic of Northern Ireland for so long.
Related papers
Identities on the Walls A Comparative Study of Loyalist and Republican murals in Northern Ireland
This thesis has investigated the formation of sectarian identities on Northern Ireland. The thesis argues that the key factor in creating and maintaining sectarian identities is cultural violence. Cultural violence creates and maintains sectarian identities by closing the historical narratives, the identities and thus putting the society in melancholia. The thesis has investigated republican and loyalist murals in Belfast and compared the historical narrative, which is the message, of the murals in order to investigate the view of history of the communities. By using murals as a source and comparing the two traditions of murals the thesis can reach the conclusion that cultural violence operates differently in republican and loyalist communities. The cultural violence is less severe in the republican community whereas the loyalist community has a more austere cultural violence. The thesis argues that the explanation for this lies in the republican efforts to adapt to the present, whereas the loyalist community has not made the same efforts. Consequently the loyalist community feels lost and betrayed hence closing its narrative further.
Trying to Reach the Future through the Past: Murals and Commemoration in Northern Ireland
Ireland is sometimes said to be cursed with a surfeit of history; memory is seen as one of the principal causes of an endless cycle of violence. In contrast, this article focuses on collective memory and examines the way in which this was drawn on as a resource by republican and loyalist communities in terms of identity and endurance during almost four decades of conflict. These identities were displayed in various commemorations and symbols, including wall murals. During the peace process these murals have been judged officially to be anachronistic, leading to a recent government-funded scheme to remove them, the Reimaging Communities Programme. This article questions the political motivation of this programme. It considers the attempts by people in republican and loyalist areas to come to terms with the peace process by emphasizing traditional symbols of identity, while at the same time reinterpreting them for a new era. Symbols can be the bridge between the past and the future which makes the present tolerable.
Political Murals "The Brothers on the Walls": International Solidarity and Irish
2010
The article considers in detail a particular aspect of the political murals painted by the republican movement in Northern Ireland, namely their references to international themes rather than solely Irish matters. These murals are seen as an instance of solidarity with people in struggle elsewhere-against imperialism and state oppression-and thus represent recognition by Irish mural painters of their affinity to liberation movements elsewhere. As such, the phenomenon points to the potential of subaltern nationalism to be progressive. Finally, the article briefly considers the difficulties facing the other main mural tradition in Northern Ireland, that of the loyalists, to engage in a similar process of recognition and solidarity.
The Trouble of Shifting Collective Memory: The Use of 1916 in Memory and Murals of Northern Ireland
In his 2007 article studying memory in Modern Ireland, Guy Beiner wrote “throughout modern Irish history, both unionist and nationalists ideologies were periodically reconstructed…yet, reconfiguration and innovation should not be confused with invention, as already established traditions of memory offered a familiar lexicon and mental framework within which contingencies could be patterned”. Beiner argues that not only was memory used to shape the mindset of groups in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but that these memories were constantly reconfigured, permitting each group a mindset which allowed them to function in the every evolving conflict. Building upon this idea of reconstructing memory, this paper will analyze how collective memory can shift or reform to focus on a specific event, making certain events of the past more prevalent or more relatable in the present. This process of reconstructing and reshaping collective memory finds a visual depiction in the murals of Belfast. Painted during The Troubles, these image themes provide evidence of the reshaping of a group’s collective memory as certain themes come to prominence while others fade into the background. This is best demonstrated by analyzing the adaptation from previously popular themes to the use of historical events which occurred in 1916: the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising. While the feuding groups selected different events, remembered in separate manners, and portrayed these 1916 events in different ways, both Loyalist and Republican murals depict the reshaping of each groups’ collective memory.
Why is there so little graffiti in Northern Ireland compared to cities in North America and Europe – including Great Britain, to which it is constitutionally connected, and Ireland, with which it is geographically connected? This question is particularly perplexing given the highly developed political mural tradition on both sides of the sectarian divide in the North, and the almost 15 years that have passed since the signing of the Peace Agreement ending some three decades of militarized conflict. This paper explores the connections between the absence of graffiti, and the street-level structures and processes of reconciliation or conflict –with a specific focus on the geopolitics of paramilitary control within communities throughout Northern Ireland. The contributions of the paper are three-fold: (1) it highlights the importance of graffiti as a (usually neglected) lens for assessing the degree to which the expected benefits of a peace agreement are experienced at the street level; (2) it addresses the methodological challenge of how to examine something that is not there (specifically, it studies the absence of graffiti in Northern Ireland by comparing it to the logic, mechanics and meanings of graffiti elsewhere); and (3) it questions the well-marketed representation of Northern Ireland as a unqualified case of successful post-agreement peace. Keywords: graffiti; political geography; Northern Ireland; political murals; ethnic conflict; paramilitaries
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.