(Post)colonial friendships and Empire 2.0: A Brexit reading of Victoria & Abdul

ABSTRACT

A 2018 report published by the British think tank Demos claims that, in Britain, “nostalgic rhetoric clearly played a significant role in the Referendum campaign, in particular, emphasising particular tropes around the Second World War, empire and the ‘re-instation’ of British sovereignty”. Indeed, these tropes feature heavily in popular culture, with several films and TV series centred on Britain’s imperial past. Taking on board Nadine El-Enany’s suggestion that “Brexit is not only an expression of nostalgia for empire, but it is also the fruit of empire”, this article discusses the role of imperial fantasies in the debate over Britain’s membership of the European Union and draws a connection between these fantasies and recent re-presentations of Britain’s imperial past on screen. Focusing in particular on Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul (2017), it argues that the film offers a sanitized version of the empire, which contributes to the reproduction of nostalgic imperial fantasies in post-European Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial India
• empire
• postcolonial Britain
• Brexit
• European Union
• Victoria & Abdul

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and the editors of this special issue – Caroline Koegler, Marlena Tronicke, and Pavan Malreddy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Writing about the British presence in Africa, for example, Boris Johnson (2016), countering Blair’s declaration that Africa was “a blot” on the British conscience, wrote in The Spectator that “the continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore” (n.p.).

2. It is not surprising, then, that the Leave campaign’s references to the empire were, as Virdee and McGeever (2018) explain, accompanied by a racist approach to migration which, without ever acknowledging its imperial past as the main cause for the current multicultural character of Britain’s social texture, pointed the finger at the EU’s “open borders” policy, portraying immigrants simultaneously as “a threat to the working class” and as “a security threat to the British population” (1806).

3. A recently published report by the Office for National Statistics shows that people from BAME backgrounds, and in particular those of Bangladeshi heritage, are paid significantly less than their white counterparts (Siddique 2019).

4. As Ruth Craggs observed, the scandal was the proof of the fact that “while many might be tempted to see the British Empire as a thing of the past the Windrush scandal demonstrates the ongoing impacts of colonial policies, histories and ideologies in the present day” (2018, 362).

5. The potential sexual interest of the monarch in Abdul is hinted at in the banquet scene, as he presents the Queen with a wobbling, phallic-shaped jelly (see Hans 2017), and yet this suggestion is never directly addressed in the film, which remains ambiguous regarding the nature of the Queen’s affection for Abdul.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant RL-2016-076.

Notes on contributors

Clelia Clini

Clelia Clini is a research associate at Loughborough University London, where she works on the project “Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination” (MMPI). Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration and diaspora studies, South Asian postcolonial cinema and literature, race and gender studies, and cultural sociology. She recently curated with Dr Deimantas Valanciunas (University of Vilnius) a special issue of the journal South Asian Diaspora. Before joining the MMPI project she was a research associate at University College London, where she worked on a project on forced displacement, creative arts, and well-being. She has taught media, cultural and postcolonial studies at John Cabot University and at the American University of Rome. She has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, the University of Roma Tre, and Vilnius University.