“Eastern Europeans” and BrexLit

ABSTRACT

This article examines the representations of “Eastern European” migration in contemporary BrexLit, focusing on Adam Thorpe’s Missing Fay (2017), Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017), Carla Grauls’s Occupied (2012), Andrew Muir’s The Session (2015), and Agnieszka Dale’s short stories. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s work on postcolonial melancholia, and extending Kristian Shaw’s “BrexLit” definition by focusing on stereotyping, it shows how the figure of the Eastern European migrant exposes unresolved anxieties around a presumed British cultural superiority, race, and empire. The arrival of Eastern Europeans and the increasing Brexodus of their “cheap labour” enables a reflection on the health of the nation – something is, indeed, rotten in post-Brexit Britain – as well as on unresolved legacies of empire that underpin the Brexit crisis. The article also analyses several promising responses from Polish British writers who interrogate the problematic staleness of these representations and take them into a much-needed new direction.

KEYWORDS:

• “Eastern Europeans”
• migration
• Brexit
• BrexLit
• Britain
• stereotypes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For an interesting discussion of framing the white working class as racist and disconnected from politics, see Beider (2015).

2. For an emerging queer BrexLit, see, for example, Waidner (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vedrana Veličković

Vedrana Veličković is principal lecturer in English literature at the University of Brighton. She is the author of Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe (2019) and has published on the intersections between postcolonialism and postcommunism (in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing), Bernardine Evaristo (in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing), Dubravka Ugrešić, Vesna Goldsworthy, and literary theory.