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

广受欢迎的Radio 4系列节目“Mark Steel's in Town”，将站在Merthyr Tydfil和Walsall等不太可能的旅游目的地，通过当地历史，观众的口头证词以及Steel自己作为一个不敬的流浪者的喜剧感，为每个目的地提供了另一种庆祝活动。钢铁在表达和打破对地方的刻板印象之间走得很好。2013年底，他在当时的英国文化之城“德里-伦敦德里”演出，在演出中，他不仅描述了德里人民对这个长达一年的节日的坚定乐观态度，而且还描述了出租车司机，店主，甚至任何人都热情表达的文化转型的话语，似乎，铁先生和他谈了谈。该市2013年的经历是从黑色旅游向凤凰旅游转变的典型例子，事实上，外部游客的经济影响也得到了充分证明。而N.爱尔兰动荡的过去并没有从风景中消失。2013年，Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann（爱尔兰音乐节）也计划首次在北爱尔兰举行（实际上是在德里市），而不是在爱尔兰共和国。虽然音乐节确实进行了，但在德里举办的相当大的阻力甚至来自其组织机构Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann（爱尔兰音乐家协会）的内部，对他们来说，这个爱尔兰文化活动和英国文化之城之间的联系是一个问题。这两个事件体现了当前项目寻求探索的伦理紧张关系，即商业驱动的向外部世界投射积极的地方感的竞争必要性之间的紧张关系，以及在长期冲突之后更复杂的社区驱动的自我塑造。这两种必要性都被理解为文化翻译的形式：国家资助的文化翻译来自外部的潜在消费者（如由NI旅游局执行）结合，不同的是，来自各个社区内部的愿望或阻力，通过跨越NI长期建立的宗派分歧的遭遇来翻译/转换他们的文化。在这两种情况下，翻译行为都不是意识形态中立的，正如翻译研究学者劳伦斯·韦努蒂（Lawrence Venuti）所提出的归化和异化的交织过程所表明的那样。北爱尔兰的民族多样性相对滞后，但却在不断增加，这为这些地方和全球驱动力提供了一个额外的中介层，自上而下和基层文化组织都在寻求参与其中。弗利德和英国文化之城之间的对话为这些互动提供了一个引人注目的例子，但更能揭示这个项目的目标，并有可能对这个和其他事件的未来产生更大的影响，（“社区节”，也被称为“西贝尔法斯特节”）。这个一年一度的活动并没有受到相同的国家媒体审查或学术界的关注，因为弗利德或文化之城，但自1988年成立以来，旨在打击西贝尔法斯特作为一个“恐怖主义社区”的看法，它已经发展成为欧洲最大的社区节日之一。此外，它不断发展的雄心，以反映全球尽可能多的地方社区是显而易见的，在其与贝尔法斯特的少数民族社区和国际艺术家从爱尔兰以外的参与。在从黑暗旅游到凤凰旅游的过渡中，Féile因此代表了所谓的“全球化”的庆祝潜力，因此，提供了一个案例研究，其潜在的应用范围超出了NI的范围，以其他冲突后和后殖民社会寻求通过“节日化”来改变自己。

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'.