Birte Heidemann

Introduction: Tracing the urban imaginary in the postcolonial metropolis and the “new” metropolis

This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the “urban imaginary”. This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the “new” metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis “has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism” (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (Baker 1996; Ball 2004; Cuevas 2008; Korte and Sternberg 2003; Onega 2002; Phillips 2004). Moreover, these critics see the “new” metropolis in opposition to the “old” – that is, European or imperial capitals of ex-colonial countries. In so doing they stress negative aspects such as overpopulation, unequal access to economic and material resources, or slumification. Following King, who cogently observed that the “new” metropolises, as discursive environments in their own right, have been “woefully neglected” (320) in the field of postcolonial studies, we attempt to both complement and complete these previous debates. As the topic has only just begun to receive nuanced critical attention (Nnodim 321–32; Sandten 125–44), this issue is dedicated to fresh approaches to cultural representations of what – since the 1960s with respect to the field of Urban Studies – has been variously termed “global city”, “world city”, “megacity”, “megalopolis”, “cosmopolis”, “galactic metropolis”, “boomburb” or “metroplex”. Our selection of articles thus aims to promote a dialogue between the politics and poetics of urban space – both real and imagined – and recent redirections of ideas and ideologies pertaining to postcolonial discourse in as well as through literature. This dialogue is shaped by what Rüdiger Kunow, among others, referred to as the “spatial turn” (186), and, more recently, Ignacio Farías and Susanne Stemmler termed the “metropolitan turn” (2). As a concept, the “metropolis” dates back to antiquity and was rediscovered during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, based on the assumption that “the concept metropolis has become of central importance and notoriety within the urban discourses” (Farías and Stemmler 2; emphasis in original), we are less interested in applying this merely abstract “concept or category of practice” (2) to a wide range of textual representations.

The symbolic survival of the “living dead”: Narrating the LTTE female fighter in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing:

This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing in English. Through a careful demarcation of the formal–aesthetic limits of engaging with the country’s competing ethno-nationalisms, the article seeks to uncover the gendered hierarchies of Sri Lanka’s civil war in two literary works: Niromi de Soyza’s autobiography Tamil Tigress (2011) and Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012). The reading draws attention to the writers’ attempt to “historise” the LTTE female fighter and/or suicide bomber within Sri Lanka’s complex colonial past and its implications for the recent history of conflict. The individual motives of the female fighters to join the LTTE, the article contends, remain ideologically susceptible to, if not interpellated by, the gendered hierarchies both within the military movement and Tamil society at large. A literary portrait of such entangled hierarchies in post-war Sri Lankan texts, the article reveals, helps expose the hegemonic (male) discourses of Sri Lankan nationalism that tend to undermine the war experiences of women.

Performing ‘Progress’: Post-Agreement Drama

Unlike its southern counterpart, Northern Irish drama had long been “the forgotten branch”1 of the island’s theatrical scene. Coinciding with the outbreak of violence, it was not until the 1970s that theatre practitioners in Northern Ireland began to liberate themselves from both British and Irish conventions of drama by developing a distinct style of performance, with the urban trope replacing the traditional rural imagery.2 Since then, the aesthetic collusion between art and politics has emerged as the defining feature of contemporary Northern Irish drama. Undoubtedly, Stewart Parker played a vital role in challenging as well as changing the role of the artist in a politically polarised society. In his oft-quoted John Malone Memorial Lecture given at Queen’s University Belfast in 1986, the playwright avows that “if ever a time and place cried out for the solace and rigour and passionate rejoinder of great drama, it is here and now. There is a whole culture to be achieved.”3 Parker’s invocation of a ‘holistic’ politics calls for an alternative approach to staging Northern Ireland, one that provides new “forms of inclusiveness”4 which transcend deeply entrenched divisive ideologies. As a result of a failed political legacy, Parker suggests, “[i]t falls to the artists to construct a working model of wholeness.”5 Here, instead of aestheticising politics, he makes a curious case for politicising aesthetics by promoting drama’s potential for alternative visions of the country’s political status quo during the Troubles. Parker’s creative clout, in particular his political prescience, has made rapid inroads well into the post-Agreement period, as playwrights respond to the country’s current campaign of ‘progress’ by re-enacting his notion of political theatre in myriad ways. The violent past, however, serves them as a mere reference point for transforming the stage into an almost “utopian space”6 where future political scenarios can be both played out and practised.7

Retrospective (Re)Visions: Post-Agreement Fiction

The contemporary Northern Irish novel is largely situated within the broader politics of the conflict, emanating from its distinct yet interrelated historico-political contexts—be it the time of the Troubles, the (post-)ceasefire period or the current phase of post-Agreement politics. With the political situation gradually devolved into deferred narratives of ‘new beginnings,’ post-Agreement novelists have responded to, resisted or refuted “the cultural politics of suspension”1 that have come to characterise the political status quo in the North. As Linden Peach has observed, “[i]n Ireland and Northern Ireland, there has always been a strong sense of the novel as a mutable and transgressive form,” one that provides “an appropriate vehicle for the ideological debates and conflicts that constitute so much of Irish social and political history.”2 Thus, it comes as no surprise that the novels set against the backdrop of communal violence have become “one of the region’s few growth industries,”3 having mutated into new form(at)s of Northern Irish fiction such as thrillers, crime narratives and romances.4 In spite of the generic limitations of ‘Troubles fiction,’ the period of political violence has produced “almost 400 novels relating to the Troubles,”5 most of which appeal to the masses by virtue of their formulaic narration. As a result, the many novels to have appeared since the outbreak of violence in 1969 have done little or nothing to portray Northern Ireland other than as “a fated place, doomed to inevitable and enduring violence”6 and have often been classified as “‘Troubles trash.’”7 Such reductionist tendencies, however, have been challenged by a number of Northern Irish novelists who published their work around the time of the declaration of the first ceasefire of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1994. These writers, as Eamonn Hughes argues, have been acutely aware of the “need to locate the Troubles as one strand in a more complex set of stories,” as if “realising that there are other stories to be told about Northern Ireland.”8 Correspondingly, Neal Alexander makes a generic classification of fiction produced within the intermediary stage of the peace process as “post-ceasefire novels,”9 while defining the period between 1994 and 1998 in terms of the political euphoria it thrust upon the general populace, one that anticipated a certain closure to, or rather consolidation of, Northern Ireland’s conflictual past.

Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature: An Introduction

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (‘Agreement’ hereafter) in 1998,1 Northern Ireland has undergone significant transformation in terms of its political governance, and its reception in the artistic, aesthetic and literary domains. As critics such as Aaron Kelly caution, the Agreement’s “bourgeois reconciliation instructs that we should be amazed, or at the very least heartened”2 by its commitment to economic change, which is most visibly manifested in the aggressive redevelopment of Northern Ireland’s capital. A walk through the streets of post-Agreement Belfast reveals not only the changing terrain of the cityscape, but also the unchanging remains of its sectarian past. This rift between rhetoric and reality finds an even more pronounced expression in the way the City Council promotes Belfast as a place to “Be Inspired,” inviting the prospective visitors to “[d]o something out of the ordinary and do something extraordinary.”3 Since 2008, the city centre has been plastered with posters that prominently feature a heart-shaped ‘B’ and a website whose very name reads like an instruction: gotobelfast.com.4 This link leads to the official visitor website of Belfast, which builds on the heart-shaped, heartfelt imagery of the rebranding campaign, soliciting the visitors to post their favourite places on the “Lovin’ Belfast” guide: “Like it, pin it, tweet it and share it!”5 In a curious way, then, the rebranding of Belfast resonates with Kelly’s cautionary remark that the Agreement “instructs” as much as it “heartens” its recipients by means of a “bourgeois reconciliation” with populism, neoliberalism and the rhetorics of economic and entrepreneurial ‘progress.’

Between the Lines: Post-Agreement Poetry

In one of her earlier poems, post-Agreement poet Leontia Flynn recounts a chance encounter with the late Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize laureate and “one of Ireland’s major exports.”1 “When I was Sixteen I Met Seamus Heaney”2 opens with the speaker running into Heaney “outside a gallery in Dublin” (l. 2), along with her friend. Far from being intimidated, the two teenagers approach Heaney in a surprisingly calm and casual manner. The playfully indifferent tone of the poem not only underplays Heaney’s artistic achievements, but it goes on to challenge the literary conventions of Northern Ireland wherein “[p]oetry is seen to be the dominant form of writing about the north and fiction is regarded…as the poor relation.”3 As the friend of the speaker asks Heaney to sign her copy of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Poor Mouth, Heaney exclaims: “That’s a great book” (l. 6). The pubescent speaker, however, prefers prose to poetry, which might explain her sheer indifference to the “personality cult of Seamus Heaney.”4 For her, compared to O’Brien, Heaney is a ‘no-name’ artist whom she does not associate with Irish classics at all, as indicated by the splitting of his name with an emphatic slash in her note: “I had read The Poor Mouth—but who was Seamus/Heaney?” (ll. 9–10).5 In Flynn’s flippant verse, there is “an oblique yet playful relationship with notions of poetic tradition,”6 one that is characteristic of post-Agreement poetry at large. Indeed, as Fran Brearton insists, “Flynn is not alone among her peers in exhibiting both an admiration of, and tendency to react against, the celebrated older generations of Northern Irish poets,”7 but is part of an emerging group of poets, most of whom published their work after the signing of Agreement: Colette Bryce, Deirdre Cartmill, Miriam Gamble, Alan Gillis, Nick Laird and Sinead Morrissey.

Diagnosing the Post-Agreement Period: A Literary Detour

If the political predicament of the post-Agreement era has been the catalyst for the emergence of a new generation of writers, it is precisely the “hurtful” and “unresolved” narrative of the North, as Liam Harte and Michael Parker suggest, that forges the means of a new literary paradigm. Indeed, post-Agreement writers—novelist, poets and playwrights alike—carefully register the historical disjuncture produced by the Agreement’s ‘progressive’ political campaign, one that merely adds to the old yet open wound of a continuous colonialism that the country has been confined to. In particular, the literary project of post-Agreement Northern Ireland concerns itself with subject identities suspended between a ‘regressive’ past and a ‘progressive’ future. In an attempt to map the contested terrain of such suspended subject positions, post-Agreement literature contests the systematic suppression of the country’s violent past in the name of economic ‘progress.’ However, the literary excavation of the troubled past does not necessarily override the writers’ common concern for the current state of politics in the North. On the contrary, despite the lack of a general consensus over the formal-aesthetic parameters of the genre itself, post-Agreement literature reveals a strong commitment to the exposition of present-day inequalities that are fraught with the rhetoric of a ‘fresh start.’ It is here, in the interstices of a suppressed past and a suspended present, that post-Agreement writers have produced a body of texts that neither attempts to ‘heal’ nor ‘resolve’ the political conundrum of Northern Ireland. Instead, with a shared concern for diagnosing the diseased nature of the Agreement, these texts decode the liminal permanence of the post-Agreement era as “an ache which notices, knows, but can barely comment on the cauterisation.”1 In that way, post-Agreement literature has established itself as an active site of resurrecting, recasting and, more importantly, diagnosing the passive absorption of the country’s violent past into an ‘agreed upon’ future.

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

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.

“We are the glue keeping civilization together”: Post-Orientalism and counter-Orientalism in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

After the 9/11 attacks, Orientalist ideologies have dissolved into various public domains of knowledge, cutting their way from academia into popular imagination. In diagnosing these dangerous developments, critics such as Hamid Dabashi have identified the need to re(de)fine the Saidian framework in order to both locate and dislocate new sites of Orientalism. Through a close reading of H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009), this essay explores how the novel is informed by a decisive counter-Orientalist politics that forges a narrative strategy to dissect the emergent post-Orientalist discourse(s). Such a reading is aimed at re-articulating the changing yet diffuse modes of (post-)Orientalism outside of its literary parameters. At the same time, the essay examines how the novel inflects both the solidarity and suspicion amongst minority communities in the post-9/11 context by means of shared victimhood.