The Possibility of Nonsectarian Futures: Emerging Disruptive Identities of Place in the Belfast of Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory

Abstract

In this paper I aim to excavate and interpret a series of ‘disruptive’ narratives of place in the novel The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson, a series of prose essays which construct an intimate, remembered, and defining vision of the city of Belfast (1997, Granta, London). I argue throughout that conflict in Northern Ireland is underwritten and informed by the imaginative geographies of rival, antagonistic, and sterile forms of sectarian nationalism, and that it is therefore necessary to seek alternative means of conceptualising social space and ‘the city’ which do not rely on narrow cultural categories and arbiters of difference. The text articulates an imaginative reinvention of the city of Belfast which goes beyond the traditional (and problematic) narratives of sectarianism, suggesting that place identity and the urban geographical experience are characterised by fluidity, hybridity, and changing perspectives.