Hauntology in Practice: Commemorating Partition in the Age of Brexit

Abstract

Brexit is haunted by the ghost(s) of partition. Since June 2016 the vexatious specter of the Irish border has returned to haunt Irish, British, and wider European politics in a way not seen since the height of the Troubles.2 In rolling news coverage and opinion columns, on social media, and even in the pages of a book that it had purportedly authored (I Am the Border, So I Am, 2019), the border has found new ways to interrupt present political settlements and to disrupt and reshape the relationships and meanings that define contemporary politics on and across “these islands.”3 Crucially, the disruptive return of the border and its divisive politics has given the lie to an assumption that had underpinned the Decade of Centenaries and its prevailing narratives on “reconciliation,”4 namely, that the vexatious question of the border had been all but successfully exorcised from political life in Ireland, North and South. Claims by the British