The colonial remains of Brexit: Empire nostalgia and narcissistic nationalism

Since the formal end of colonialism, perhaps no single political event has been as influential in shaping British narratives of national and transnational identity as the United Kingdom’s (UK) departure from the European Union (EU). The elusive, protracted, and unceremonious slew of events – with their vague beginnings in the Treaty of Lisbon and an equally indeterminate ending wagering on the empire’s vestigial hold in the Commonwealth – that came to be known as “Brexit” in popular parlance, continues to frame assessments of difference and sameness, freedom and dependence, regional alliances and cultural entitlements, and discourses of national health and viral threat. Brexit has triggered large-scale speculations about social insecurities and national trauma. It has given racism a free pass, and hate speech a broader acceptance in society. It has bolstered populism, prejudice, and homophobia – and yet also instilled a sense of hope and renewal, not least among its apologists, lobbyists, and also sizeable sections of the British population. The convergence of these mutually reinforcing discourses has often been attributed to the turmoil of the British Referendum on EU membership on June 23, 2016 which, for many, was a moment of reckoning – the day when Britain’s deep social divisions became visibly manifest. In literary criticism, the ensuing coinage of “BrexLit” (Day 2017; Shaw 2018; Ferguson 2019) as a catch-all phrase to describe what appeared to be a novel body of texts, even a “new landscape of British fiction” (Day 2017, n.p.), similarly implied that the result of the Referendum was entirely unanticipated, triggering a sustained sense of cataclysmic change and sociopolitical emergency. This special “Brexit” issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing moves away from any such temporal or generic framing of Brexit as a novel, even unforeseeable “event”. Instead, it identifies and historicizes Britain’s departure from the EU as the result of a long-standing process, rooted in persisting imperial attitudes and, arguably, narcissistic yearnings.

To be sure, Brexit is not a bona fide postcolonial event. But, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate, it represents a moment when anxieties about harnessing and unleashing colonially engineered power structures and cultural hierarchies crystallized. If Britain’s departure from its colonies marked the end of colonialism as we knew it, then, for some, Britain’s departure from the EU marked the end of yet another kind of colonialism. In his resignation letter as Foreign Secretary on July 9, 2018, Boris Johnson warned that Theresa May’s Brexit plan would reduce Britain to “the status of a colony” (Buchan 2018, n.p.). Johnson was not alone in ruminating on the perks of being or holding a “colony” – Tory backbenchers, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and the Leave campaigners repeatedly, at times habitually, tapped into colonial nostalgia, conjuring images of a glorious imperial past of global dimensions. What was formulaic about Johnson’s projection was the sheer imaginary bankruptcy: a colonizer assuming the role of the colonized. This is by no means unique to Johnson or the Leave campaign; other populist leaders across Europe – Marine Le Pen of France, Giuseppe Conte of Italy, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, Björn Höcke and Alice Weidel of Germany – have enjoyed a moderate success in appropriating the language of oppression and victimhood, repeatedly wielding it against EU membership, to advance their own populist agenda. In Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain, the Irish critic Fintan O’Toole (2018) reads this doubling act of the Leave campaign as both the victim and beneficiary of a supposed Brussels dictatorship as a play of “the political erotics of imaginary domination and imaginary submission [which] are the deep pulse of the Brexit drama” (25). Sure enough, the doxa of Britain-becoming-a-colony was further exacerbated during the interregnum of Brexit, flanked by familiar references to World War II.¹ In their commentary on Brexit and nostalgia, Campanella and Dassù (2019) quip: “having defeated the French and the Spaniards throughout the centuries, having stopped Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev from permanently disrupting global order, London was now primed to roll back Brussels’ technocrats” (107). Populist appropriations of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, are rolled into this logic, as in public appeals that Britain should muster warlike endurance to extricate itself from both the clutches of the coronavirus and the grip of the EU. As this confluence of empire imaginary, anti-EU sentiments, and paradoxically deep identitarian investment in European history already indicates, Theresa May’s “truly global Britain” may not be all that global in outlook but poised on a selective, if not a skewed, representation of Britain’s role in colonial history that postcolonial studies is best equipped to articulate.

Populist campaigns built around the commingled tropes of Brexit, empire, and World War II have proven highly effective across various sections of British society, and have exerted a particular force amongst those who witnessed the gradual crumbling of empire after the war. As John McLeod notes in his contribution to this special issue – “Warning Signs: Postcolonial Writing and the Apprehension of Brexit” – World War II was the last large-scale political and military event affording untainted heroism before the empire collapsed entirely – and with it, if more gradually and more uncertainly, its moral legitimacy. As such, World War II was the last incarnation of a kind of British imperial fortitude that continues to facilitate a safe and legitimate sense of national attachment, particularly in times of upheaval. Given the affective investment in Britain’s victory (one that bars critical examination of colonialism up until this day), “devolving power to the EU [has been] experienced as especially destabilizing to nationalists’ sense of self-esteem and progression” (Beaumont 2018, 380). In a twist or two, resistance to EU policies has become a way of preserving British exceptionalism, carried over from empire’s “last days of innocence”. For the populist camps, Britain’s EU membership has helped to sustain a victim-like, sacrificial, and defensive position, giving ample opportunity for constructing the country as having to fend off unjust, inferiorizing “onslaughts” of EU bureaucrats, and abject invasions of European immigrants. In the process, as Sarah Franklin (2019) observes, the “recommemoration of lost British soldiers [has been brought] to a reforgetting of how British imperialism, Orientalism, and racism set the stage for the globally catastrophic losses of the two world wars”, thereby “displac[ing] the violent legacies of enforced racial hierarchy, military subjugation, and theft of resources from colonized peoples around the globe” (51–52). In its continuing predilection for self-aggrandizing visions of empire, as well as a lack of critical self-positioning in relation to its imperial history, Britain remains vulnerable to “the threat posed by injured white nationalism” (52). Eurosceptic manoeuvring of the EU into the phantasmatic position of the colonizer, and of Britain itself into the position of the resisting and retaliating colonized, is symptomatic of such predilection and lack. It reveals not only the perverse flexibility of populist discourses – to arrogate, appropriate, and even claim the discursive position of the colonized – but also a continuing inability to conceive of transnational cooperation outside the framework of domination and victimhood. Therefore, in more than one sense, and for more than one reason, as John McLeod remarks in his article in this issue, such positionings reflect a “failure of the imagination”.

Likening Britain’s current, post-Referendum position to the varied and often violent resistance movements in former colonial territories not only makes a compelling case for populist myth-making, but also bespeaks a potent blend of imperialism, narcissism, and exceptionalism. Given its grievances over the perils of domination and perceived victimhood, parts of the Brexit debate are narcissistically invested in hierarchical, controlling relationships (“take back control”), rather than more balanced, inclusive, and socially just models of cooperation. In her essay “The Disaster of Colonial Narcissism”, Simone Drichel (2018) fruitfully conjoins clinical thought on narcissism and postcolonial theory, in particular Leela Gandhi’s (2006) research on “affective communities”. Drichel flags what Gandhi names colonialism’s “crisis of nonrelation” (184) and the “antirelational basis of imperialism” (185) which stand in the way of more meaningful (affective) politics based on relationality. Drichel also accentuates Diane Simmons’s (2007) study, The Narcissism of Empire, which paints a pathological “portrait of narcissism [as] a grandiose sense of superiority alternating with feelings of loss, rage and revenge” (1). According to Simmons, as an antidote to these infirmities of negation, “subject peoples” serve as a physic mirror to “their conquerors, as they could be compelled in a variety of ways to reflect back to the imperialist a grandiose self-image” (1).

With the loss of its colonies that in many ways shaped Britishness and its cultural boundaries through annexation and exclusion, it seems that empire’s narcissistic disposition, as defined by Simmons, has been preserved. In an age of public apologies, colonial reparations, restorative justice, and truth and reconciliation, it may serve us well to read shame and guilt as potentially enabling affects, as opposed to their presumed complicity with passivity, docility, or the politics of victimhood (Malreddy 2019, 311). If shame can be defined as “one’s shortcomings” in relation to the social standards a person “identifies” with (Striblen 2007, 478), and guilt as a recognition of one’s wrongdoings to others, then, as Wüschner (2017) posits, a shame that does not transform into guilt can effectively lead to a “narcissistic rage that does not really care for the ones who have been wronged but only grieves the loss of social recognition” (99). Applied to the context of imperial demise, Wüschner’s reasoning suggests that, for Britain, this rupture in the affective pact between shame and guilt represented an abject loss of its recognition worldwide. Furthermore, resistance movements, equally worldwide, waged an unrelenting campaign against colonial rule to expose its wrongful injuries, wrought in the name of a “civilizing mission”. In short, accepting empire’s modus operandi as the cause of a “wrongful injury to others” (Murphy 1999, 235; emphasis in original) would prove damaging to the narcissistic self. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the appropriation of the colonized position by none other than Britain’s current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is neither innocent nor premediated, but an unfortunate consequence of his inability to come to terms with empire’s injurious past that ultimately shaped the Leave campaign’s exceptionalist logic.

In this introduction, then, we wish to frame Johnson’s dramatic usurpation of a scenario of “reverse-colonization” as symptomatic of repressed anxieties surrounding empire nostalgia and narcissistic shame. Whilst the narcissistic forces of empire hang in the balance and, eventually, might have been more constructively resolved while Britain was still an EU member, Brexit has for now forestalled any such possibility. Indeed, it has revived those remains of empire’s narcissistic nationalism that now militate against the very idea of Europe. Cultural productions concerning Brexit in many ways register the affective upheavals – a sense of doom and relief about the nation’s much-anticipated “independence” – that the decision to quit the EU has produced throughout British society. In one peculiar instance, the “Irish Border” (2019) itself has joined forces with literary and cultural productions on Brexit, authoring an autobiography under the rubric of “I am the Border, so I am”, as if reaffirming its corporeal presence, territorial absence, and existential erasure – all at once.² Other striking examples, some of which are discussed in greater detail by individual contributors, include neo-historical films about particularly “heroic” chapters of British national history such as Christopher Nolan’s (2017) Dunkirk and Joe Wright’s (2017) Darkest Hour. Both these films rehearse the empire nostalgia and narcissistic nationalism we have outlined above – or, as Robert Eaglestone (2018) puts it, the “cruel nostalgia” with which World War II as a subchapter of Britain’s imperial history is remembered. Sam Mendes’s (2019) much-lauded 1917, though marketed as an anti-war movie, similarly positions Britain in the role of the heroic underdog that emerges victorious over an all too powerful, external (German) aggressor. All these cultural productions feed on both empire nostalgia and apocalyptical scenarios of World War II-type post-war austerity.

In turn, the rich body of novels that either explicitly interrogate Brexit’s colonial entanglements, or else are discussed in this context, consist of such wide-ranging texts as Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016–20), Mohsin Hamid’s (2017) Exit West, Anna Burns’s (2018) Milkman, Sam Byers’s (2018) Perfidious Albion, or Bernardine Evaristo’s (2019) Girl, Woman, Other. Theatrical works that negotiate the nostalgic notions of long-lost colonial influence as well as the anxieties surrounding migration that have fuelled anti-EU sentiments include Zinnie Harris’s (2015) How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court Theatre), Mike Bartlett’s (2017) Albion (Almeida Theatre), and Sharon Watson’s (2018) dance work Windrush: Movement of the People (Phoenix Dance Theatre) – as does Billy Bragg (2017) with his album Bridges, Not Walls (see Reinfandt 2019). From the field of art and photography, Martin Parr’s (2019) exhibition Only Human at the National Portrait Gallery and Anish Kapoor’s (2019) artwork A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down exhibited at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery bear testimony to “a garish scar [which] opens as Britain’s inner geography is mutilated by violently redrawn borders” (Ghoshal 2020, 3).

The contributions to this special issue do not “write back to the empire”, so to speak, but write into, away from, and against the colonial underpinnings of the Brexit discourse. They trace and critique the present day’s empire nostalgia and populist myth-making in the UK through a wide range of literary and cultural productions, and remind readers of the proleptic potential of postcolonial writers in identifying the residual ideologies of imperialism in the lead up to and after the Brexit campaign. With their vast geographical as well as diverse linguistic reach – India, Britain, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Barbados, Eastern Europe, and Greece, among others – the articles featured here make a productive contribution to postcolonial literary discourse. A number of contributors employ Paul Gilroy’s (2004a) concept of “postcolonial melancholia” as Britain’s lingering grief over a lost empire and the “heroic” chapters in British history. If melancholia is a product of the loss of the object of national desire or the erasure of “whole segments of national past [ ... ] leaving destructive blank spaces in individual autobiographies” (Gilroy 2004b, 107–108), then nostalgia is best understood as an attempt to retrieve, recreate, and, where needed, reinvent such lost objects through populist myth-making, as evinced in the Leave campaign’s promise of a return to past imperial glory in the guise of a “truly global Britain”.

Ronald Cummings’s article “Ain’t No Black in the (Brexit) Union Jack” complicates the question of borders upon which the entire Brexit discourse rests. Through an original reading of Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (2005), Cummings offers a critique of the narrow formulations of British national identity in Brexit discourse by delineating the exclusion of black subjects from the Union Jack since the time of HMT Empire Windrush and the annexation of colonies as part of empire’s cultural heritage. John McLeod’s article offers an equally refreshing historical perspective on Brexit literature, arguing that postcolonial literatures have long anticipated the advent of an event such as Brexit. McLeod reads Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) as prime examples of anticipatory texts that unveil the historical, racial, and socio-economic “origins and depth of a crisis brought by the long formation of Brexit’s post-imperium”. Within this historicist frame of Brexit, Lindsay Moore’s “Brexit Literature’s Present Absentees: Triangulating Brexit, Antisemitism, and the Palestinian Crisis” reads two texts – British Jewish author Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019) and British Palestinian author Raba’i al-Madhoun’s Fractured Destinies: A Novel (2018) – that shed light on Britain’s colonial interventions in the Middle East from the 1917 Balfour Agreement to present-day discourses of Zionism and anti-Semitism. Moore contends that the empire’s fork-tongued policy “accrues [new] meaning when read in awareness of British colonial intervention in the Middle East and in the context of its divisive departure from Europe”.

Shazia Sadaf’s “‘We Are All Migrants Through Time’: History and Geography in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West” leaps from historical contingencies to speculative postcolonial futures shaped by Brexit. Sadaf argues that, despite its dystopian setting and the trials and tribulations of its characters through disjointed times and spaces, Exit West ends on a hopeful note and gestures towards a seamless assemblage of races, geographies, and technologies that must learn to live together. Vedrana Velickovic’s “‘Eastern Europeans’ and BrexLit” examines the postcolonial vacuum occupied by the Eastern European migrants in Britain. Velickovic’s broad corpus – Adam Thorpe’s Missing Fay (2017), Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017), Carla Grauls’ Occupied (2012), Andrew Muir’s The Session (2015) and Agnieszka Dale’s short stories – reveals the sites and sources of postcolonial paranoia and the subsumption of Eastern European migrants to an imperial logic, even if they do not find a place within the history of British colonialism.

Marlena Tronicke’s “Imperial Pasts, Dystopian Futures, and the Theatre of Brexit” returns to the contested turf of the British Isles, albeit with a focus on drama. She mediates Mike Bartlett’s (2017) country house drama Albion and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017), set during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, through Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia, suggesting that only through a constructive engagement with the colonial past can a post-Brexit Britain be envisaged. Birte Heidemann’s “The Brexit Within: Mapping the Rural and the Urban in Contemporary British Literature” draws on Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017) and Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), while reversing the gaze on the inequalities within British society. By linking Raymond Williams’s thesis on the discrepancies between “city and the country” to the structural divide between metropolis and the colony, Heidemann reads the two novels as postcolonial commentaries on the multiple entries and exits – across class, culture, and race – within and among British society. Jan Rupp’s “Writing Back to Brexit: Transcultural Intertextuality, Refugees, and the Colonial Archive from Chaucer to Kipling” holds that a refraction of the colonial archive helps understand how the refugee figures are both written in and written out of the colonial narratives. Against this, Rupp argues that contemporary accounts of refugee literature, largely occasioned by the Leave campaign’s xenophobia and ethnic exclusionism, write back the wandering and vagrant migrant figures into the colonial canon. Clelia Clini’s “‘We Are Here For a Greater Purpose’: Brexit, Britishness and the Re-production of Imperial Fantasies on Screen” turns to the cinematic representations of imperial desires through a close reading of the 2017 historical film Victoria & Abdul. The film, drowned in the nostalgic effluvia of Victorian glory, turns a blind eye to the jarring inequalities between its Indian character and Queen Victoria, thereby reaffirming the dated view that colonialism is, at its best, a benign enterprise.

Although the articles featured in this special issue make a strong case for reading Brexit through the lens of colonialism and postcolonial discourse, they do not necessarily exhaust other ways of readings the events leadings up to UK’s departure from Europe: the rise of right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic; the use of social media technologies in swaying public opinion; the internal inequalities and divisions within the EU; the dwindling fate of regionalisms and local governance structures in the face of global capitalism; and, last but not least, the proliferation of fake news, “alternative facts” and “post-truth” discourses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for Pavan Malreddy [grant number MA 711911-1].

Notes on contributors

Caroline Koegler

Caroline Koegler is assistant professor of British literary and cultural studies at the University of Münster. She is the author of Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market (2018) and co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (2020), Law, Literature and Citizenship (forthcoming), and “Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters” (special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020). Current articles include “Queer Home-Making and Black Britain. Claiming, Ageing, Living” (Interventions, 2020) and “Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)” (NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, forthcoming). She is also working on a monograph on the politics of emotion in literature of the long 18th century.

Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Pavan Kumar Malreddy teaches English literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. His recent publications include a monograph, Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism (2015), a co-edited collection, Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (2015), and a co-edited volume, Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (2019). He has co-edited special issues of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012), ZAA: Journal of English and American Studies (2014), Kairos (2018), and European Journal of English Studies (2018) and has authored over 30 essays and chapters on terrorism, political violence, and postcolonial theory in journals such as The European Legacy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Intertexts, and AlterNative, among others. He is currently working on a monograph titled Insurgent Cultures.

Marlena Tronicke

Marlena Tronicke is assistant professor of British literary and cultural studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her areas of research and teaching include early modern as well as contemporary British drama, Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, and adaptation studies. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published in 2018. She is co-editor of Black Neo-Victoriana (with Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Julian Wacker, 2021) and “Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters”, a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (with Caroline Koegler, 2020).

Notes

1. A case in point: on the campaign trail for Brexit, Nigel Farage “would ride into town in a purple campaign bus playing the soundtrack from classic Second World War film The Great Escape” (Beaumont 2018, 385–386), so as to warm up his audience.

2. The author of this avant-garde enterprise is the same person who founded the Twitter account @BorderIrish, and chooses to remain anonymous.