https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0347-1540
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ABSTRACT
This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 30.
2 Mengiste, “This is What the Journey Does,” 131.
3 Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, 5.
4 Stonebridge, “The Banality of Brexit,” 9.
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Appiah, The Lies that Bind.
7 Radford, “Spring, by Ali Smith. Timeless Novel.”
8 Shaw, “BrexLit,” 20.
9 Dillet, “Suffocation and the Logic of Immunopolitics,” 241.
10 Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, 190.
11 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 59.
12 Goodfellow, Hostile Environment.
13 Herd, “Afterword,” in Refugee Tales II, 114.
14 Nguyen, “Introduction,” 15.
15 Smith, Spring, 1.
16 Smith, Winter, 125.
17 Smith, Spring, 184.
18 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small, 24.
19 Newell, Global Green Politics.
20 Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 4.
21 Ibid., 238.
22 Smith, Spring, 170.
23 Shaw, “BrexLit,” 29.
24 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small, 40.
25 Said, On Late Style, 7.
26 Smith, Spring, 6.
27 Nixon, Slow Violence, 11.
28 Mondal, “Scratching the Post-Imperial Itch,” 90.
29 Holmes, “The Barrister’s Tale,” 55.
30 Herd, “Afterword,” in Refugee Tales II, 119–20.
31 See Nixon, Slow Violence, 34.
32 Suleyman, “My Name Is My Name,” 24.
33 Smith, Spring, 252.
34 Morton, Hyperobjects, 1.
35 Smith, Winter, 62.
36 Smith, Spring, 308.
37 Ibid., 223.
38 Rau, “Autumn after the Referendum,” 32.
39 Ibid., 33.
40 Smith, Spring, 241.
41 Ibid., 240.
42 Ibid., 41–2.
43 Mouffe, For a Left Populism, 23.
44 Smith, Spring, 243.
45 Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, 195.
46 Mouffe, For a Left Populism, 23–4.
47 Smith, Spring, 21.
48 Smith, Autumn, 119.
49 Consider the narrator of Lytton Smith’s “The Pruner’s Tale,” 181.
50 Gilroy, Between Camps, 87.
51 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 60.
52 Smith, Spring, 276.
53 Ibid., 205.
54 BoJo is an abbreviation for British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
55 Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, 209.
56 Preston, “Spring, by Ali Smith – Luminous and Generous.”
57 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 100.
58 Smith, Spring, 205; and Mbembe, Necropolitics, 33.
59 See the discussion in Behrman and Kent, eds., “Climate Refugees.”
60 Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 24.
61 Smith, Spring, 162.
62 Ibid., 163.
63 Nixon, Slow Violence, 8.
64 Ibid., 229.
65 Dylan, The Lyrics, 125.
66 Preston, “Spring, by Ali Smith – Luminous and Generous.”
67 Smith, Spring, 220.
68 See Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioglu, eds., Decolonising the University.
69 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 141.
70 Nixon, Slow Violence, 7.
71 Smith, Spring, 79.
72 Ibid., 197.
73 Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 143.
74 Nixon, Slow Violence, 31.
75 Kennedy, “The Migrants,” 209.
76 Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 21.
77 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 20.
78 Docherty, “Brexit: Thinking and Resistance,” 194.
79 Smith, Winter, 224.
80 Morton, Hyperobjects, 51.
81 Smith, Spring, 199.
82 Ibid., 324.
83 Angelou, And Still I Rise, 41.
84 Said, On Late Style, 7; and Smith, Spring, 284.
85 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 28–9.
86 Smith, Spring, 287.
87 Thunberg, No One Is Too Small, 13.
88 Ibid., 67.
89 Smith, Spring, 288.
90 Ibid., 160.
91 Smith, “The Detainee’s Tale,” 55.
92 Herd, “Afterword,” in Refugee Tales III, 185.
93 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 11.
94 Herd, “Afterword,” in Refugee Tales III, 193; and Gurnah, “The Stateless Person’s Tale,” 9.
95 Smith, Spring, 134.
96 Dillet, “Suffocation and the Logic of Immunopolitics,” 250.
97 Gilroy, Between Camps, 111; and Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, 5.
98 Smith, Spring, 126.
99 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 30.
100 Smith, Spring, 126–7.
101 Radford, “Spring, by Ali Smith. Timeless Novel.”
102 Nguyen, “Introduction,” 19.
103 Smith, Spring, 196.
104 Clingman, The Grammar of Identity.
105 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 99.
106 Stonebridge, “The Banality of Brexit,” 9.
107 Smith, Spring, 234.
108 Gilroy, Between Camps, 252.
109 Smith, Spring, 167.
110 Richter, “The Two Bodies of Biopolitics,” 6.
111 Smith, Spring, 66–7.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John Masterson
John Masterson is a lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Sussex and a Research Associate of the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersand. He is the author of The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah (Wits University Press, 2013) and works on a range of contemporary texts and authors, with a particular focus on African and American diasporic writing. His articles have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures, American Literary History and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. He is currently completing his second monograph, Singular Stories, Shared Destinies: Re-Routing African and American Literature in the Obama Era.