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This thesis film is an examination of my evolving perspectives and understanding of my Irish heritage as I travel to the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Through the course of a year and a half, I traveled to Belfast to explore the modern state of the sectarian conflicts between the Catholic and Protestant communities. Through the use of personal reflection, historical research, interviews with local residents, and on-location experiential learning, I began to learn not only about the modern state of Belfast and its economic and social climate, but also about the complexities of personal cultural identification and the concept of “truth” and “mutual guilt” when associated with acts of violence. With the use of the short documentary as the medium of choice, I am able to relay to audiences not only my own personal reflection of identity and history, but then allow them to reflect on their own perspectives as well, helping to create sincere moments of personal thought and reflections.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, August 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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Troubling Spaces explores the relationship between the representation of space and place on the Northern Irish stage and the production of space that occurs within Northern Irish society during the Troubles. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, I examine how Nationalists and Unionists produced a series of communal narratives which allowed them to reorder Northern Irish space and its social relations. Additionally, I examine how these communal ideologies create divergent concepts of Northern Irish place which Doreen Massey refers to as negative and enclosed concepts of place. This not only reinforces the dualistic binary between Nationalism and Unionism, it also incites tribal associations and allegiances. Moving on from this, I conduct a close reading of three Troubles plays, Stewart Parker’s Northern Star and Pentecost and Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, to examine how their dramatic narratives intersect and interact with non-traditional stage space to produce dramatic environments which provide compelling commentaries on Northern Irish spatiality. My examination of Northern Star traces the development of the ideological structures which shape Northern Irish spatiality; in Pentecost, I explore how its liminal domestic space is perfectly suited to illustrate the dynamic conceptualisation of place Massey argues for; and, finally, in Tea in a China Cup, I develop the distinction between private domestic spaces and public social spaces further by examining matrilineal narratives in relation to communal symbols within a female-coded domestic space. Through these close readings, I will demonstrate that a dialogical relationship can be discerned between the production of space and place that occurs within Northern Irish society and the representation of it on the Northern Irish stage. While many plays have the potential to act as an endorsement of the restrictive and enclosed concepts of space and place in the ideological frameworks of Nationalism and Unionism, the three that I have chosen provide important counterpoints during the Troubles that actively resist their cultural hegemony.

Aleksandra Hajduczek