White Troubles: The Southern Imaginary in Northern Ireland 2008–2016

Abstract

Southern discourses and iconography—Confederate flags, Civil War generals, Civil Rights leaders and photographs—have long circulated in Northern Ireland. Flags, pins, tattoos, jerseys, and other symbols have long differentiated Catholic from Protestant, nationalist from unionist, republican from loyalist in the six counties of the North. Surprisingly enough, in recent years those symbols are often American—that is, southern. When the US is evoked in Northern Irish discourses today, it is not Boston or Chicago that comes up: it is Charleston, Birmingham, and Little Rock. In particular, white communities in the six counties adopt US Civil War, neo-Confederate, and civil rights rhetoric and imagery in sectarian disputes on race, ethnicity, and immigration. Whiteness in both nationalist and loyalist communities is now often calibrated in relation to historical and current forms of southern blackness and southern whiteness in response to austerity policies and the so-called “new racism.”