Vulnerability in contemporary Northern Irish literature: from climate change to troubles tourism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much contemporary Northern Irish literature appears to be firmly localist. However, this writing is always already in the process of ‘worlding,’ registering the imprints of transnational forces. For example, authors’ attentions to the local symptoms of climate change are necessarily means of diagnosing global disorder. Seamus Heaney’s poetry, often touted as a triumph of regional specificity, develops a ‘sense that … threats to the planet are intuited in the local place’ (District and Circle bookjacket). Likewise, texts that treat the post-conflict ‘neutralisation’ of Belfast’s city centre signal broader forms of resistance to global neoliberalism. As writers like Leontia Flynn and Glenn Patterson suggest, efforts to entice tourists to the North by reinventing Belfast as a global ‘anycity’ are forms of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’: erasing the conflict for the sake of visitor dollars does sociopolitical violence to historical memory, and turning the city centre into a glass-and-concrete playground for upwardly mobile elites does material violence to working-class communities. Moreover, such writing activates a politics of vulnerability: disclosing one’s own wounds can also be, as Judith Butler notes, a way to ‘furnish … a sense of [broader] … community’ (22), and local susceptibilities can thus be transmuted into forms of cross-border empathy and coalition-building.