Introduction to English narratives and identities

This special edition, produced by the Narratives and Identities Group based at the University of Portsmouth, UK on English narratives and identities, is a reflection on how both are shaped and interwoven through imaginations, structures and processes that define expectations of social order and change. The relationship between order and change is a restraint between equilibrium and disequilibrium (between what is known and what is not known), where social stability depends on conceptualising change in relation to that which has gone before and whether it can be seen as a continuity of that past, or a departure from it. This tension is invariably based on notions of risk and, because of that, involves fears about destabilisation and demise. The presence of both is a constant in the social and political imagination since, as Freud observed, expectations of civil society are ‘perpetually menaced with disintegration’ (quoted in Kaplan, 2023, p. 31). In relation, since ‘change disorders order’, so the continuity and stability of order depends on ‘disciplining our desires, to assure that social peace can continue’ (Gopnik, 2020, p. 85).

Such order is therefore regulated by the threat of disorder, or at least another influence that may damage established beliefs about social and political consistency. Because of this, concerns about the limit of freedoms arise and particularly so when those freedoms are promoted through the forces of populism, repression and fanaticism, all of which seek to undermine consensus and agreed structures of order (Applebaum, 2020; Lepore, 2023). As Recalcati reminds us, when it comes to the tensions between stability and change, freedom may be a central aim and desire for most but ‘it is also an object of anxiety and rejection’ (Recalcati, 2022, p. 2) because it brings with it the potential for unpredictability and chaos. Accepted beliefs about stability and order therefore rely on a comparative relationship with instability and disorder so as to retain credibility and public support, but that support also requires blaming and shaming those who represent a threat to the norms of control and order. Notably, we use our portrayal of others to make sense of who we are, but, as well as that, we use those others to help us make sense of who we are not.

In more recent years concerns about who we are have been particularly oriented towards threats posed by the outsider and reasserting the boundaries not just of territory, or geography, but identity and recognition. The outsider is routinely used to reaffirm our self-identification and he brings into sharp relief what we stand to lose by allowing his entry as opposed to what we stand to gain. The stress is on negativity, hostility and isolation. The outsider is the personification of change we do not want because he is the animation of loss we fear. Unlike us, he is a threat to the social stability we believe must be maintained and defended even if narratives that assert this portrayal routinely deter empathy, understanding and curiosity (ibid: p. 9). The foreigner who seeks to join society, as Recalcati notes, ‘becomes a permanent threat to any purity of identity’ (ibid: p. 10) and so encourages us to take protective measures that favour exclusion and dehumanisation. The very freedoms that we want and believe make us who we are seem unavailable to others precisely because they are used to remind us of who we don’t want to be. Their presence encourages us to resort to regulation, rejection and disregard that serve to strenghten the boundaries of what we will, or will not, tolerate. In the process, as Makari reminds us, we prioritise separation and become blinded to ‘possible commonalities’ (Makari, 2021, p. 244). The outsider must therefore be presented as different in every way possible so as to maximise the perceived threat of assimilation. Here, diversity is not seen as an advantage to social order but the basis of disorder and a weakening of who we believe we are because of it. The outsider represents not just the unknown but the most extreme threat to what is known. He stands not merely as a dilution of our identity but a possible destruction of it and on that basis he must not be allowed to enter. He simply does not belong.

To think in terms of the wall is not just a matter of how we treat others but how we come to prioritise systems, process and structures of control that ensure social order. The wall keeps people in as well as people out and, in so doing, provides expectations about how we should react and respond to internal and external threats. The systems we come to value, or believe best serve our interests also reflect how we perceive others and how they should be treated. Control is therefore integral to processes of social regulation that we prioritise, or come to accept. But those processes also rely on predictable narratives to limit the possibilities of interpretive difference. Such narratives exist to maintain a hierarchy of relations that enable others to be seen as inferior and a threat precisely because those others lack the means to counter the image of negativity and danger that is imposed upon them (Pickering, 2001). The notion that he who comes with nothing has nothing to offer and so has arrived as a recipient rather than a contributor is a dominant trope of the negative stereotype. The outsider is routinely seen as a threat to commonly held national values of charity and generosity and so a threat to identity that is sustained by such ideals. Not only does the presence of the outsider stand as a potential risk, but he represents a violation of what we believe we stand for. Homogeneous depictions of the outsider therefore serve to homogenise how we see ourselves.

Resistance and restraint impose limits on who we think we are and who we are not. Yet challenging such limits is important not only to help understand who we are but to help us imagine what we might become. The essays that follow in this edition are an invitation to consider the relationship between what is preferred and protected alongside what may be seen as a problem for each and the way of life prioritised as a result. How we chose to imagine others is ostensibly a matter of narrative and how we chose to deal with those others is a manifestation of how we imagine them through such narratives.

Maggie Bowers’ article, that draws on Angela Carters novel Wise Children (1991) and Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem (2009), is a call to recognise how Englishness often relies on the exclusion of particular voices and communities in order to maintain dominant myths and histories that sustain continuity and sameness. In her engagement with the above works she highlights how counter-dominant discourses are often under-represented and, not surprisingly, ignored. Her article seeks to expose how resistance that arises from marginalisation tends to be absent from portrayals of Englishness, highlighting an absence and a disparity with regards to certain identity preferences that undermine conventional narratives about what it means to be English and how exclusive and inclusive identity formations operate together to shape that process. In a sense, her analysis points towards walls, or boundaries, that invariably make constructive exchange about difference unlikely and this is so because ‘closure ends up prevailing over openness’ (Recalcati, 2022, p. 9).

Attention to those who are excluded and how that exclusion is used to reinforce thinking about inclusion (‘them’ and ‘us’) arises in Christine Berberich’s article which uses literature to examine how migrant strangers in the context of Brexit are seen as ‘unbelonging’ and so a threat to the belonging that constitutes what Englishness is meant to be. Depictions of others as mass, without individuality or difference, reduce such people not just to objects of suspicion, but ridicule. The question this should perhaps incite is threat to what? What way of life is jeopardised by assimilating or integrating those of difference? Literature is important for both Bowers and Berberich, who suggest it can put the reader into the situation of the other and so invite empathy and understanding in ways conventional journalistic depictions cannot. It can offer not just a more expansive narrative of experience and plight but also invite the reader to engage with the outsider by identification with the problems faced. What Berberich encourages us to think about is how we generalise others through not just regulation, but the internalisation of combat and conflict in order to separate us from them (Coetzee & Kurtz, 2015, p. 16). This interplay, in requiring the disregard or omission of inconvenient narratives, also means that repression is vital for the acceptance of order (ibid: p. 14), even if this creates a resistance to ‘know and understand ourselves fully through others’ (ibid: p. 11). Here, without wider reception towards those others and openness to alternative narratives the experience of the ‘communal, shared reality’ that defines humanity is lost (ibid: p. 5), and, in that moment we are expected not to identify and include, but to discriminate and divide.

Perhaps one of the areas where this is most apparent is in how we construct or see the outsider, through ‘uneasiness, aversion and hostility’, where perceived clarity and so certainty, stand in contrast with the more ambiguous aspects of national identity formation (Cohen, 1994, p. 7), It is here, as Cohen has argued, that ‘the frontier guards’ of identity function, deciding who is acceptable and who is not, who can be included and who will be excluded; and where the excluded deserve to be so largely because they are seen as incompatible with national identity expectations. Under threat, the flexible, shifting and porous aspects of identity are replaced by more predictable, established and specific notions of difference that narrow the scope for appreciation of others who have little discernible identification with the images and narratives being promoted.

However negative perceptions of others are reached they almost certainly draw from an emphasis that fails to invite dialogue since this absence is necessary for the dehumanisation process that the excluded are subjected to and cannot challenge. And this, as we know, comes from the stories that we are told and tell ourselves about the outsider. In this context, stories that provide cohesion and continuity in the telling convince ostensibly because alternatives are unavailable and so, because of this unavailability, they support the sense that ‘we are generally right and other people are generally wrong’ (Coetzee & Kurtz, 2015, p. 4). This, Coetzee believes, explains why memory is not just a matter of narrative and the stories we tell ourselves but the stories we choose to ignore. The stories that are inconvenient, or uncomfortable, or question the certainties we have about ourselves.

Tom Sykes highlights some of the problems and issues that arise when forgetting is used is remove inconvenient narratives about the past in his piece on how the Second World War is remembered and commemorated. His argument is that repression of alternative viewpoints and uncomfortable truths, though limiting and indeed potentially dangerous for understanding history, is central to ideals of nationhood. Sykes’ article, argues that such portrayals rely on exclusion and the isolation of narratives that question established loyalties. As Linda Colley reminds us, British identity and history is forged on war where imaginations of the nation rely on mass patriotism, and where the threatening outsider is used to unite the nation, so lessening the possibility of other interpretations and viewpoints undermining that unity (Colley, 1992, p. 368). At such times, national identity takes on a sharper and more certain relief and imagined communities invariably reinforce the impression that society is equal and agreed, with relationships horizontal rather than hierarchical (Anderson, 2006, pp. 6–7). This, in turn, perpetuates sameness and cohesion as an essential myth of national identity, obscuring the presence of inequality and difference along with narratives that interrupt, dispute, or destabilise the dominant themes and expectations of the national picture.

A further examination of how stories shape a sense of who we are and not just as individuals but in terms of geography and place is found in Louis Netter and Tom Sykes’ use of visual and textual observations of English seaside towns. The drawings in this article raise questions about viewpoint and how those who experience, or live, at the borders between land and sea exist on the peripheries of society not just metaphorically, but also materially. The drawings and text focus on those often ‘left behind’ by the promise of modernity and progress and attempt to offer portrayals that raise questions about self-reflection often based on a false sense of ‘familiarity with the depicted’. In some of the poorest areas in England Netter and Sykes find a sense of community bound not so much by social mobility and economic aspirations but rather by stasis and sameness that, although often repressive in nature, also helps alleviate the everyday pressures of survival and social isolation. How artistic representation along with textual observation might be used to further explore this existence brings us to a bigger question of how identity is seen both by those inside and outside of place. In that sense, this chapter offers a contribution to understanding the relationship between agency and assimilation and how both reinforce, or bring to question, the national identity myths that persist.

As argued, identity is not just found in narratives of history and community. It exists in the systems, processes and structures that are used to maintain social order. It exists in the attitudes and assumptions that we have about perceived fairness and justice and how we view the treatment and of others through that perception. Aaron Pycroft’s article sets out to expose how the attitudes that drive this belief can be not only misinformed but damaging for all concerned. Pycroft looks at how substance misuse and the criminal justice system tends to ignore the value of forgiveness in relationships damaged by addiction and questions what this tells us about how we see our own compliance in systems and procedures that undermine productive approaches to self and the wider community. Though we may believe that we possess an innate sense of fairness, and so rightness, in relation to justice (Duke-Evans, 2023) that derives from an emotion attachment to the commonality of the law, this belief also encourages each ‘to see their own hand in the state and its laws’ to the extent where, through this personalisation, ‘the law becomes you’. On this, we should also note that such an association has been a constant ‘in the signs and symbols of nationhood’ so making our relationship with issues of social disorder and justice not just a matter of social concern, but national identity (Colls, 2002, p. 33).

To think differently about how we believe issues of crime and deviance should be dealt with means understanding our own relationship with both differently and so seeing ourselves differently. It is also to realise that much assumption about crime is dependent on those who carry it out being removed from within and contained by walls (prisons) that serve not just to separate, but homogenise and dehumanise. This segregation presents the insider with a worthlessness that is comparative to the dangerous and unwelcome outsider and so warrants similar disregard and dismissal in how he is understood and dealt with.

Clearly problems arise for many in accepting others whose sense of nation and identity does not complement their own, but this also stands in some contradiction with the ideals of democracy and a democratic impulse that is inclined towards creative and fluid approaches to change and the accommodation of difference. Significantly, the democratic mind, from this point of view, has an integrative function that ‘aims to hold and tolerate all its different elements so that nothing is eliminated’ (quoted in Recalcati, 2022, p. 45), so offering scope for a constructive relationship and movement between areas of difference. This inclination also acts, we might believe, to help us transcend hate and the belief that expressing hate (disguised or in overt form) is a necessary relief for dealing with anxiety and threats to order (ibid: p. 21).

The risk that comes with engaging in dialogue and conversation is precisely that it may lead to a change of mind or, at least, a shift in how one thinks about and relates to others. Yet, it is also difference that becomes a marker and driver for the descent into populism, when the other is depicted antagonistically and as a violation of accepted norms (Sacks 2007, p. 49). In such a moment, groups and communities are construed as victors or victims and attitudes are shaped as a choice about differentiation along the lines of better or worse, trustworthy or untrustworthy, known and unknown. (ibid: p. 53). In the process, belief in what constitutes a decent society easily descends into accepting humiliation as a valid response, even if inconsistent with values of civility and responsibility (Margalit, 1996). This indicates how the democratic mind, as Bollas informs us, depends on ‘vacillation’ (in Recalcati, 2022, p. 45) rather than stasis and obsession with sameness.

We hope that the articles in this special edition might act as a starting point for encouraging thought about the advantages of other spaces where narratives can be exchanged considerately rather than be used to demoralise, undermine and defeat. A space that draws from an ethos of civility to promote, develop and stabilise a common good of dignity (ibid: 190) while recognising the need for disagreement and diversity of opinion. A good that is of mutual value (Reich, 2018, p. 42) and that acts as a ‘pool of trust’ underpinned by an agreed collective responsibility for others (ibid: 49). This shift, from the homogenous to the heterogeneous, determined by a moral framework of respect, requires us to see dialogue and mutuality as the basis for progress, in contrast to conventional portrayals that can deter accommodation, curiosity and tolerance.

But, if we are to respect the need for a more embracive contemplation of others, perhaps we might also see the value for a greater poetic emphasis within narratives that can develop alternatives to the often undemocratic and stilted imaginations of dominance and certainty (Coetzee & Kurtz, 2015, p. 7). Moreover, while we should not underestimate the security that dominance and certainty provide, or see accommodation of difference as requiring mere agreement or capitulation to alternatives being promoted, we should particularly not underestimate the repression that sustains hardened and rigid identity traits and how that hardening and rigidity acts to prevent curiosity or receptiveness towards others by reinforcing distance and dissonance between us and them.

In that spirit, the following articles are an attempt to highlight alternatives that emerge from consideration of difference, as well as how those alternatives present risk and threat to those who feel their lives are being changed by others with which they feel they have no historical, national or communal attachment. The articles point to how the dominance of narratives tends to act as a defensive and preventative barrier to the possibility of change by relying on the exclusion, or denial, of other narratives. This, we believe, is the basis for a more serious discussion about the relationship between dominance and subjugation and how the social and political consequences of this tension come to inhibit progress and so human possibility.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.