Infrastructures of Memory in Post-Brexit Northern Ireland

The application of postcolonial theories to cultural, political, and historical structures and identities on the island of Ireland has long been intertwined with disagreements over the nature of postcolonial subjectivity. That being said, analytical strategies co-opted from postcolonial scholarship, Transcultural Studies, and memory theory provide useful platforms for understanding the dynamics of cultural identities in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in light of the histories of political, cultural and socio-economic coercion the region faced over centuries. This chapter considers the way in which echoes of colonial discourse could be heard in the 2016 referendum debate. The Leave campaign’s rhetoric conceptualised Brexit in nostalgic terms, reframing the United Kingdom as a major actor upon a global – not a European – stage. It also threw into relief an alignment of Ulster Unionism with Brexit as an articulation of British sovereignty. The very fact that the implementation of a vote to leave the EU would necessarily complicate the more insular relationship between Britain and the island of Ireland resulted in an enforced rehearsal of Unionist identities. Debates around Northern Ireland’s positioning within the EU, however, posited alternative models of Northern Irish identity inflected with transcultural dynamics. This chapter therefore argues that an awareness of competing infrastructures of memory and cultural narrative contributes to a greater understanding of the process of identity formation in post-Brexit Northern Ireland.