Ain’t no black in the (Brexit) Union Jack? Race and empire in the era of Brexit and the Windrush scandal

ABSTRACT

This article examines Brexit and the Windrush scandal as twin manifestations of the border anxieties that have structured questions of belonging in contemporary Britain. It discusses Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack as two texts which attend to questions of race and empire in the mid-20th century in relation to British national identity. Both Clarke and Gilroy situate the reterritorialization of Britain in the wake of the globalizing history of British Empire which made possible, for instance, the widescale solidarities and conscriptions of World War II. In their attention to the role of empire in the making of Britain, these texts effectively complicate easy demarcations of Britishness and borders and allow us to historicize the conditions under which national boundaries have come to be so central to narratives of British identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Gilroy
• Austin Clarke
• Brexit
• Windrush scandal
• British Empire
• reterritorialization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The concept of the hostile environment might be linked to Christina Sharpe’s (2016) discussion in In The Wake of how anti-blackness is the weather: “In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate” (106; emphasis in original).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronald Cummings

Ronald Cummings is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at Brock University, Canada. His research focuses on critical Maroon studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Caribbean literary historiography. He is co-editor (with Alison Donnell) of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020 (2021).