British migrants in Berlin: negotiating postcolonial melancholia and racialised nationalism in the wake of Brexit

ABSTRACT

World War II nostalgia in the UK is mired in a postcolonial melancholia that not only fuels Brexit nationalism, but carries implications for how the UK relates to the European Continent. This paper presents an empirically engaged examination of Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia by exploring how British migrants negotiate this “complex ailment”. Engaging with empirical research conducted with British migrants in Berlin, I will examine how migrants negotiate this form of nationalism through their relationships with family members in the UK. The particular position of the British migrant in Germany illuminates how postcolonial melancholia’s entrenchment shapes British nationalism and Britain’s relationship to mainland Europe. It explores discourses of British exceptionalism before examining how Brexit’s foregrounding of empire nostalgia pushes migrants to redefine their relationship to Britain. Meanwhile, black British migrants inhabit a different orientation to the postcolonial through their practical engagement with complex colonial histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Britain
• Germany
• Brexit
• race
• migration
• nationalism

Acknowledgments

The author thank Joshua Paul, Naaz Rashid and colloquium colleagues at the TU Berlin’s Institute of Sociology for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper was developed from a blogpost on coronavirus, new nationalisms and Second World War fantasies (see Kulz 2020).

2 All descriptors of ethnicity, nationality or class background have been given by the participants.

3 Germany is not immune to historical reconstructions; see the Alternative for Deutschland or Reichsbürger movement.

4 All ethnic minority participants had experienced racist incidents in Berlin; this will be discussed in future publications.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Postdoctoral Initiative.