Walls, Lines, and Boundaries: Dividing Cultural Identities in Post-colonial Communities
My Session Status
The session addresses the role of physical walls and boundaries in the construction of separate cultural identities. It is often said that “fences make good neighbors,” but walls and fences also serve to create physical boundaries that both divide communities and leave behind a heritage of new and divergent identities.
Two of the papers in this session (Donnan and Laurents) address the impact of the so-called “Peace Walls” erected in multiple Belfast neighborhoods after 1969. Though built to maintain security and limit violence in communities torn apart by the Northern Irish “troubles,” the ironically named "Peace Walls" have served to only reinforce and deepen sectarian divisions generated by centuries of British imperialism. The violent conflict of earlier decades has given way to the relatively peaceful co-existence of recent years, but Belfast is now a deeply divided city where the two communities are not only physically isolated, but each has its own divergent narrative of the recent conflict, and its own antagonistic identity and cultural heritage.
The third paper (Providence) looks at the construction of modern cultural identities among African and East Indian groups in Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. The Caribbean offers a perfect illustration of how colonialism jumbled established geographical, cultural, and ethnic identities by transporting and forcibly blending different ethnic groups from different parts of the world, whose descendants are then faced with the task of establishing new collective identities within the new geographical boundaries and cultural contexts. The paper contrasts the utility of Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation as an “imagined community” with Stuart Hall's analysis of diasporic identity in terms of ethnic affiliations.
Sub Sessions
British military officials created the “Peace Walls” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in August 1969, in order to separate hostile communities in neighbourhoods where sectarian tensions were reaching a boiling point. The walls, which started as rows of barbed wires, are today a series of forty-foot structures made of cement and steel that tower over neighbourhoods located on both sides of the conflict. They stand to this day, despite the recent peace agreement in Northern Ireland. Yet the vio...
This paper will look at the effect of the “Peace Walls” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, through the lens of Michel de Certeau’s theory of the relationship between urban spaces, heritage narratives, and collective identity. In this paper, I will examine the relationship between manipulation of urban space by the British military authorities in Belfast and the hardening of oppositional heritage narratives and identities in the communities and neighborhoods that have been cut apart by the walls...
This paper will look at the construction of modern cultural identities among African and East Indian groups in Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. The primary focus will be on how they have constructed their cultural and communal identities. The Caribbean offers a perfect illustration of how colonialism jumbled established geographical, cultural, and ethnic identities by forcibly blending different ethnic groups from different parts of the world, whose descendants are then faced with the task o...