From Dark Tourism to Phoenix Tourism: The Ethics of Cultural Translation in Urban Festivals

The popular Radio 4 series 'Mark Steel's in Town', which takes the stand-up to such unlikely touristic destinations as Merthyr Tydfil and Walsall, offers an alternative celebration of each destination via local histories, oral testimony from audience members, and Steel's own comic sense of place as an irreverent flâneur. Steel walks a fine line between expressing and exploding stereotypical perceptions of place. In late 2013, he performed in 'Derry-Londonderry', the then UK City of Culture, during which performance he described, to the audience's amusement, not only the unflinchingly buoyant attitude of the people of Derry in response to this year-long festival, but also the discourses of cultural transformation that were enthusiastically expressed by taxi drivers, shopkeepers, indeed anyone, it seemed, with whom Steel engaged in conversation. The city's experience in 2013 is the quintessential example of a shift from dark tourism to phoenix tourism, and indeed, the economic impact in terms of external visitors is well attested. Yet N. Ireland's troubled past was not absent from the landscape. The Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann (Festival of Irish Music) was also scheduled to be held in NI for the first time in 2013 (indeed in the city of Derry), rather than the Republic of Ireland. While the festival did go ahead, considerable resistance to its being hosted in Derry came even from within the ranks of its organising body, the Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann (Society of the Musicians of Ireland), for whom the association between this Irish cultural event and the UK City of Culture was a problematic one.

These two events embody the ethical tensions that the current project seeks to explore, tensions between the competing imperatives of a commercially-driven projection of a positive sense of place to the outside world, and a more complex community-driven self-fashioning in the wake of a long history of conflict. Both imperatives are to be understood as forms of cultural translation: the state-funded translation of culture to potential consumers coming from outside (as performed by e.g. the NI Tourist Board) combines with, variously, a desire or resistance from within individual communities to translate/transform their cultures through an encounter that crosses NI's long-established sectarian divide. In neither case is the act of translation an ideologically neutral one, as the intertwining processes of domestication and foreignisation theorised by Translation Studies scholar Lawrence Venuti make clear. An additional mediating layer between these local and global drives is offered by NI's relatively belated, but increasing, ethnic diversity with which both top-down and grass-roots cultural organisations are seeking to engage.

The dialogue between the Fleadh and the UK City of Culture offers a high profile example of these interactions, but more revealing for the objectives of this project and with the potential for greater impact on the future of this and other events, is Féile an Phobail ('The Community Festival', also known as 'The West Belfast Festival'). This annual event has not been subject to the same national media scrutiny or academic attention as the Fleadh or the City of Culture, but since its inception in 1988, aimed at countering perceptions of West Belfast as a 'terrorist community', it has grown to become one of Europe's largest community festivals. Moreover, its evolving ambition to reflect a global as much as a local community is evident in its engagement with Belfast's ethnic minority communities and with international artists from outside Ireland. In the transition from dark tourism to phoenix tourism, Féile thus represents the celebratory potential of the so-called 'glocal' and, as such, provides a case study with potential applications reaching beyond the NI context to other post-conflict and postcolonial societies seeking to transform themselves through 'festivalization'.

1. Culture and tourist industries: for the festival organisers, for key funders such as the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (NI), for museums and archives such as PRONI (Public Record Office of NI, with whom the PI has recently been awarded an AHRC CDA and which is funded by DCAL, the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure) and for the travel industry, the project will provide archival and touristic resources, academic analysis and policy proposals that will enhance the cultural, social and financial potential of their work into the future. It will also suggest paradigms for how festivals can surmount linguistic barriers, enable marginalised linguistic communities and enhance the capacity of those communities to create a 'third space' for engagement with the other. In constructing new platforms for engagement, in new and virtual media, informed by new archival material and an enhanced relationship with local communities (through the crowd-sourcing initiative in particular), the project will develop Féile an Phobail's e-marketing and v-marketing strategies, while also enriching the already profound sense of historicity and community that these festivals have for their activist base and permanent staff.

2. Wider community: the project will focus on disadvantaged groups on the margins of cultural capital, examining how those groups can be engaged to develop dynamic local cultural initiatives, and how those initiatives, in opening up a space for transcultural exchange, can translate the community to wider society, in linguistic, social and cultural terms. Festivals are widely acknowledged to play a vital role in enhancing community cohesion across a range of indicators (see Williams 1995, Goss 2000, Guetzkow 2002, Quinn 2005), often 'fostering pride in a sense of place, heritage and identity' in communities where 'feelings of disinheritance and loss of ownership are sometimes becoming prominent' (M. Smith and K. Forest, 2006; 139). Through an analysis of the cultural artefacts of the festivals and the historical hinterland of their formation, through the active participation of the community in harvesting date, and through the availability of materials in digital forms, it is envisaged that this project will also return to the communities the knowledge they have co-created through engagement with the festivals and the project itself.

3. Funders: The project will further provide those engaged in the provision of services aimed at promoting community cohesion and combatting disadvantage and division through cultural initiatives with substantial research and a position paper on which to base new policy information. In the UK region most adversely affected by the recent economic recession, DCAL's explicit policy on cultural development since 2011 has been to focus resources on initiatives aimed at tackling poverty and social exclusion.

4. Arts practitioners: many of Northern Ireland's most well-known arts initiatives - such as Féile an Phobail, the Stone Chair Project, Charabanc, Derry Frontline, Dubblejoint, Tinderbox, and more recently, Etcetera - have emerged from unfunded community ventures in contexts of marginalisation and few available resources. However, the success of these ventures has been attributable, to a large degree, to the goodwill and dynamic activism of community networks assisted by arts practitioners such as Martin Lynch, Marie Jones and Field Day. It is envisaged that this project will highlight the role of arts practitioners as nodes for the intersection of local community interests and arts bodies, channelling this confluence into new, creative synergies that have become the hallmarks of the festival examined by this project. The project will therefore illuminate the importance of arts practitioners in terms of activating what are often isolated and disadvantaged community groups, building traction in the arts communities and garnering support that is otherwise largely inaccessible.