Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia D
IPARTIMENTO DI STUDI LINGUISTICI E CULTURALIC
ORSO DIL
AUREAM
AGISTRALEL
INGUE, C
ULTURE,
COMUNICAZIONE“Englands Under Glass”: Portraits and Contestations of Englishness from Modernism to BrexLit
Prova finale di:
Demetra Amadasi Relatore:
Diego Saglia
Correlatore Gioia Angeletti
2018/2019
Contents
Abstracts
Introduction...1
Chapter I. Discourse and English National Identity 1.1. Michel Foucault's Discourse: Knowledge, Truth, Power...6
1.2. Nationalism and England: Englishness, History and Brexit ...11
Chapter II: English Encyclopedias and Uncyclopedias 2.1. The Listing Tradition and Encyclopedic Narrative...32
2.2. Foucault's Heterotopias...41
Chapter III. Criticizing the Garden of England. D.H. Lawrence's “England, My England” (1914- 1924)...48
Chapter IV.1930-1940 and Late Modernists' Anglocentric Turn. Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941)...68
Chapter V. Constructs of Englishness in the novel between 1950 and 1990 5.1. The Myth of the Golden Age. L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953)...87
5.2. A Miniature Monarch. A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978)...97
5.3. Encyclopedic Nostalgia. V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) ...101
Chapter VI. Theme Parks, Lists and Panoramic Views. Julian Barnes' England England (1998)...115
Chapter VII. “Keep England Going”: the Colony in James Hawes' Speak for England (2005)...130
Chapter VIII. BrexLit: the Literature of an England in Search of Identity...144
Chapter IX: The Great Brexit Novels 9.1. The State of the Nation: Jonathan Coe's Middle England (2018)...165
9.2. A Fragmentary Unity: Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet (2016-)...177
Conclusion...196
Bibliography...200
Abstracts.
This work intends to offer a historical perspective on “BrexLit”, published in reaction to the 2016 Referendum. While there are certainly economic and political reasons for the Leave vote, Brexit is a predominantly cultural phenomenon, in its effects as in its origins.
Starting from Foucault's theory of discourse and its emphasis on knowledge, power and truth, the first chapter considers the mechanisms of discourse as analogous to those at the basis of the construction of a nation and therefore of nationalism.
Subsequently, the chapter follows the evolution of English nationalism, as delineated by Krishan Kumar (2003). The need to find a new role for the nation after the Second World War, the collapse of the British Empire and the decline in support for the Union have all contributed to the division between the two competing entities, Britain and England. Due to the conflict between two sources of identity, one institutional and the other purely rooted in culture, England has constantly been represented in public occasions and political discourse by a series of lists and cultural items derived from the past, so that it emerges as a nation enshrined and preserved in myth, made present on a public level but obscuring the actual experience of English citizens.
This is evident in the series of literary works taken into consideration in the following sections, from D.H. Lawrence's “England, My England” up to those that are part of the “BrexLit” current: all reflect and examine the image of the nation popularized in moments of national crisis and re- definition.
The analysis of these texts and their relationship with the cultural context of their time is indebted to Edward Mendelson's “Encyclopedic Narrative” (1976). For Mendelson, the aim of encyclopedic works is to describe a whole national culture, while also opposing it. Another key notion is Foucault's theory of heterotopias, first described in The Order of Things (1966). In their literary manifestation, heterotopias are intended as representations that denounce their own artificiality and illusion, and consequently act against the classificatory principles of lists through their microcosmic structure. This is what guides the works examined, which deal with the need for a specific English identity.
Promptly announced, published and studied, BrexLit is a rapid response to contemporary crisis.
However, the contrast between an encyclopedic England and its actual circumstances has been systematically reflected in literature in similar moments of national crisis and re-definition. Viewing encyclopedic works through the lens of heterotopias allows for a reading of these literary portraits of the nation as critical of the discourse at the basis of nationalism: as they all conclude, at the centre of national culture and identity is something ambiguous that cannot be defined.
Questo lavoro si propone di dare una prospettiva storica alla “BrexLit”, nata in risposta al risultato del Referendum del 23 Giugno 2016. Le ragioni per il voto a favore dell'uscita dall'Unione Europea sono, nell'immediato, economiche e politiche, ma la Brexit è un fenomeno soprattutto culturale, nei suoi effetti come nelle sue origini.
Prendendo le mosse dalla teoria del discorso di Michel Foucault, si considera quindi l'intreccio di potere, conoscenza e verità nella delineazione di una nazione e nella diffusione del nazionalismo.
Con questa lente, si ripercorre lo sviluppo del nazionalismo inglese, come analizzato da Krishan Kumar (2003): sviluppatosi in modo più esplicito solo dopo la dissoluzione dell'Impero, la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e la devoluzione dei poteri ai parlamenti di Scozia e Irlanda, esso ha contribuito alla separazione tra un'identità culturale esclusivamente inglese e il ruolo puramente istituzionale dell'Unione. Rappresentata nelle manifestazioni pubbliche e nel discorso politico da una serie di richiami culturali derivati dal passato, l'Inghilterra emerge come una nazione cristallizzata nel mito, che la rende presente a livello pubblico, ma che oscura la vita quotidiana dei cittadini inglesi.
Questo è evidente in una selezione di opere letterarie che vanno da un racconto breve di D.H.
Lawrence ai romanzi che si possono inserire nella corrente della “BrexLit”: tutte prendono in esame l'immagine della nazione proposta a livello pubblico in momenti di crisi e ridefinizione nazionale.
Una chiave di lettura delle opere è fornita dal saggio “Encyclopedic Narrative” di Edward Mendelson (1976), nel quale l'autore delinea il genere della letteratura enciclopedica: tali opere si propongono di riassumere e allo stesso tempo contestare la cultura della propria nazione. Inoltre, fondamentale è la nozione di “eterotopia”, descritta per la prima volta da Foucault nel 1966 in Le parole e le cose. Nella sua forma letteraria, l'eterotopia viene intesa come una rappresentazione che tradisce la propria natura di costrutto e di illusione, opponendosi alla struttura classificatoria tipica delle liste grazie alla propria struttura microcosmica. È questo il filo conduttore delle opere prese in esame nelle sezioni seguenti, da quelle moderniste fino ad arrivare ai romanzi pubblicati dopo il Referendum, che vengono intesi come sintomo del bisogno di un'identità specificatamente inglese.
Perciò, si può inquadrare la BrexLit come l'ultima fase di un percorso iniziato molto prima.
Annunciata, pubblicata e riconosciuta con rapidità, la BrexLit stessa è una risposta immediata alla contemporaneità. Ma, come dimostra questo studio, il rapporto tra l'Inghilterra nella sua dimensione mitica ed enciclopedica e quella reale è stato riflesso nella letteratura in modo costante in momenti analoghi di crisi di identità nazionale. Leggere opere di natura enciclopedica attraverso la lente dell'eterotopia permette di interpretare queste rappresentazioni letterarie come un'opposizione ai meccanismi più rigidi del nazionalismo, e come dimostrazione che al centro della cultura e dell'identità di una nazione si trova qualcosa di ambiguo che non può essere definito o delimitato.
El objetivo de este trabajo es proporcionar una perspectiva histórica del “BrexLit”, o sea las obras publicadas después del Referéndum de 23 Junio de 2016, en el que los ciudadanos del Reino Unido y especialmente de Inglaterra optaron por la salida de la Unión Europea. Las razones por ese voto son económicas y políticas, pero el Brexit es un fenómeno principalmente cultural, tanto en sus efectos como en sus orígenes.
Comenzando por describir la teoría del discurso de Michel Foucault, nos centraremos en el entramado de poder, conocimiento y verdad en la construcción de una nación y en la propagación del nacionalismo.
Seguidamente nos detendremos en el desarrollo del nacionalismo inglés, descrito por Krishan Kumar (2003). Según esta teoría el nacionalismo inglés impulsó la separación entre un sentido de identidad inglés y el papel institucional de la Unión. Representada en las manifestaciones públicas y en el discurso político a través de una serie de referencias culturales conectadas al pasado, Inglaterra aparece como una nación consolidada en el mito, anunciando así su presencia pero al mismo tiempo eclipsando la vida cotidiana de los ciudadanos ingleses.
En las secciones siguientes nos centraremos en el análisis de unas obras literarias para comprobar en qué manera están relacionadas con sus entornos. Cada obra ofrece un comentario sobre la imagen de la nación proporcionada al público durante los momentos de crisis y redefinición nacional. Este estudio se basa en dos conceptos teóricos. El primero se encuentra en el ensayo
“Encyclopedic Narrative” de Edward Mendelson (1976), quien esboza el género de la literatura enciclopédica: obras que están finalizadas a sintetizar y simultáneamente cuestionar la cultura de su propia nación. De igual importancia es la noción de “heterotopia”, definida por Foucault en Las Palabras y Las Cosas (1966). En su forma literaria, la heterotopia se puede interpretar como una representación que delata su propio carácter de construcción artificial e ilusoria. Por eso, la heterotopia se opone a la estructura de clasificación típica de las listas precisamente gracias a su forma de microcosmo. Este es el hilo conductor de las obras que analizamos, desde las Modernistas hasta las más recientes, que señalan la falta de una identidad bien definida.
Anunciada, publicada y reconocida con rapidez, la literatura de la época Brexit es una respuesta inmediata a su contexto contemporáneo, pero siempre la literatura ha reflejado la relación compleja entre la versión enciclopédica de Inglaterra y su situación real en los momentos análogos de crisis nacional. Finalmente, se puede concluir que revisar las obras de naturaleza enciclopédica a través de la teoría de las heterotopias nos permite leer estas representaciones literarias de la nación como una resistencia a los mecanismos más estrictos del nacionalismo. Como se desprende de este recorrido literario, en el núcleo de una cultura e identidad nacional se halla algo ambiguo, que no puede definirse ni delimitarse.
Introduction
This work intends to offer a historical perspective on “BrexLit”, the literature published in reaction to the 2016 Referendum. While there are certainly economic and political reasons for the Leave vote, Brexit is a predominantly cultural phenomenon, in its effects as in its origins: this thesis starts from the premise that the reasons for Brexit lie in an unresolved identity crisis especially powerful in, if not limited to, England. In this perspective, it is possible to link this crisis to a refusal to locate, question or redefine Englishness in an institutional setting. By contrast, a cultural sense of belonging, based on exclusionary principles, seems to have been fostered alongside the more public and civic state of Britain. In this view, the collapse of the British Empire and, more recently, a decline in the support for the Union, have contributed to deepening the division between the two competing entities, Britain and England. Therefore, Brexit can be read as the re-emergence of a specifically English nationalism. This view is sustained by various correlations in the polls published after the Referendum, but also by the themes that emerged in the campaign that led to the vote. The references to the Empire, to historical episodes ranging from the “Norman Yoke” to a mythical version of the Second World War, the employment of war talk and a binary logic of Us/Them: all can be traced back to the development of an exclusively English sense of identity that turned into a form of nationalism. In this trajectory, the national identity based on sense of cultural belonging slowly gained momentum and became the basis for claiming political agency.
This link is made clear in the first chapter, which draws together several closely connected theories. Starting from Foucault's theory of discourse and its emphasis on knowledge, power and truth, this section considers the mechanisms of discourse as analogous to those at the basis of the construction of a nation and therefore of nationalism. Subsequently, it follows the evolution of English nationalism, as delineated by Krishan Kumar (2003). The need to find a new role for the nation after the Second World War, the collapse of the British Empire and the decline in support for the Union have all contributed to the division between the two competing entities, Britain and England. Due to the conflict between two sources of identity, one institutional and the other purely rooted in culture, England has constantly been represented in public occasions and political discourse by a series of lists and cultural items derived from the past. This way, it emerges as a nation enshrined and preserved in myth, made present on a public level but obscuring the actual experience of English citizens.
The second chapter explains the theories at the heart of the literary analysis employed to view series of texts and their relationship with the cultural context of their time. The conceptual
framework is indebted to Edward Mendelson's “Encyclopedic Narrative” (1976). For Mendelson, the aim of encyclopedic works is to describe a whole national culture, while also opposing it. This is especially relevant in an English context, given the “listing tradition” with which England has been consistently described across the years. Another key notion is Foucault's theory of heterotopias, first described in The Order of Things (1966). Linked to the classificatory principles of lists and often intended as specific places (such as prisons, cemeteries, museums, funfairs and theatres), in their literary manifestation heterotopias are intended as representations that denounce their own artificiality and illusion, and consequently act against the classificatory principles of encyclopedias. One way they are able to do this is through their ability to juxtapose several spaces and times in themselves, and therefore displaying a microcosmic structure which both replicates and questions the structure formed by encyclopedic discourse.
This is the view taken when reading the series of literary works proposed in the following sections, from D.H. Lawrence's “England, My England” up to those that are part of the “BrexLit”
current: all reflect and examine the image of the nation popularized in moments of national crisis and re-definition. More poignantly, all deal with the need for a specific English identity, depicted as a nation in miniature, and they allow the characters and the small spaces they inhabit to embody an entity bigger than themselves. Therefore, the thesis borrows the definition of an “England under glass” from Malcom Cowley's review of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), and applies it to different works in order to describe the representations of the nation they contain. Based on a limited view of the nation's past and culture, this “England under glass” implies immobility and isolation, a stable view typical of nationalism, in which the nation is kept unaltered and excludes
“other” subjects. Similarly, public and political discourse has represented England with a backward look that fixed itself on episodes from history and cultural items from the past, thereby effectively keeping England “under glass”, without inserting it in a wider, globalized contemporary world, and leading to the current protest and search for a new identity.
This itinerary begins with the third chapter, which is dedicated to Lawrence's short story,
“England, My England”. The reading of the short story focusses on the mise en abîme evident in the main character's fantasy version of his country, elicited by Crockham cottage and its garden, in which Egbert re-enacts the actions of the men of a “by-gone” England. For the protagonist, a supporter of the folk-music renaissance popular around the 1910s and 1920s, the cottage is out of time and unites modern England to that of the hamlet. Crockham can therefore be read as a heterotopian site, containing a whole version of the country taken from the past. Its use in the short story is read as a critique of the trope of the “real England” popularized by the country in a time of conflict during the First World War.
In the same way, the analysis of Virginia Woolf's final novel-play, Between the Acts (1941), draws attention to its denouncement of the constructed nature of an idyllic Englishness and its limited vision of the country's history, culture and society. In all of them, Woolf sees the employment of a strict classification that mimics on a small scale the one underlying patriarchal and fascist projects. The novel is a complex work, merging poetry, play and essay, and it responds to the contemporary reaction elicited by the Second World War, which spurred a sense of patriotism mobilised by propaganda. Based on the country's past, this discourse is criticized through the use of a pageant of national history penned by a woman, Miss La Trobe. Several other heterotopian devices are employed by Woolf to depict a strict order and hierarchy that eventually ends in dissolution: this England is effectively “under glass”, but only to point to the impossibility of maintaining one single narrative. The nation, for Woolf, is as plural as the mirrors and the cacophony that conclude the final act of the pageant. While nationalism offers a narrow view of identity, Woolf highlights the different possibilities contained in one word and in one identity.
The same theme is developed in the following section, which offers a brief tour of the constructed nature of Englishness from the 1950s to the 1980s, via an analysis of four main texts:
L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), John Fowles's essay “On Being English Not British” (1964), A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1989). This chapter is concerned with highlighting the different modes in which the authors tackle the cultural discussion about the nation in several key moments. Hartley employs his protagonist's fantasy of a new mythical century in order to respond to the important role of the nation-building impulse at the heart of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The same theme is explored and questioned by Byatt, who depicts the relation between the country and the actual experience of the inhabitants of an English village. This is achieved through a double perspective: the first impressions of the main characters in 1953 and their retrospective glance on the same year, twenty years later. The version of England that was popularized in the Coronation year was a mythical one, derived from the past and represented by the new monarch, who is a reiteration of Elizabeth I and of the accompanying myth of the Virgo Astraea. However, Byatt places her in a painting in which she appears deformed under the weight of the map of her own country. In addition, she shows the Queen entering the living rooms of her subjects via the reduced screen of the TV, which diminishes her stature by effectively representing her as a miniature doll.
Fowles's essay, instead, is interesting because it confirms Kumar's theory on the separateness of English and British identity: however, once again, in order to define Englishness, the novelists has to recur to another myth taken from the past, that of the Green Man and of Robin Hood. Naipaul's semi-autobiographical novel tackles the legacy of imperialism and the conundrum inherent in a
colonial writer's indebtedness to the culture of the “mother country”. In chronicling his stay in a Wiltshire cottage in the grounds of a manor house and depicting its “perfection”, the narrator embarks on a journey that leads him from the passive belief in the static image of the country derived from English culture towards a more liberating stance, in which he is able to recognize the invented nature of the Englishness in which he had been trapped.
The notion of a static image of the country derived from a series of limited cultural items and historical events is questioned by Julian Barnes in his novel England, England (1998), which is the subject of the sixth chapter. This critique is displayed in the creation of the eponymous theme park, which contains every element, landscape, historical event or myth that makes up the national identity. Drawing a parallel between personal and national identity, Barnes points to the artificiality of both, and uses the theme park as a way to criticize the use of the country's past in a marketing enterprise.
Next, chapter seven takes into consideration James Hawes's comic novel, Speak for England (2005). As the title indicates, it portrays the search for a specifically English voice, embodied by Brian Marley's identity crisis. After the reality TV show in which he appears as a contestant goes wrong, Brian meets a Colony of Englishmen and women, hidden in a valley in Papua New Guinea, the survivors of a crash in 1958. With this device, Hawes shows how susceptible England is to the appeal of a cultural and political project based on an outdated and simplified world view. This miniature England, which has survived intact from the 1950s, is used to investigate and question the current identity crisis: in the novel, the picture of England given by politicians is insufficient and England is forced to look to the past for a meaningful narrative.
Chapter eight is dedicated to an overview of BrexLit and its main currents, as identified by Robert Eaglestone (2018) and other commentators, with special attention given to the features that provide insight into the current English identity crisis. Obviously, the themes are those that emerged during the Referendum debate: the use of a specific version of history, the distance between the metropolis and the provinces, the economic inequality leading to discontent and the generational gap that runs through society. The modes of these contemporary works range from political satire to the historical novel, from dystopia to the crime novel, but despite their diverse styles, they can all be interpreted as a search of identity in an era of national confusion.
However, two novels in particular are given special attention in the following section, which is centred on Jonathan Coe's Middle England (2018) and Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet (2016-), the two most prominent novels published after the Referendum. By comparing the structure of the novels and the way they depict Brexit England, it becomes possible to understand why they offer a more thoughtful response to contemporaneity.
This itinerary, therefore, provides some insight into the BrexLit phenomenon, but it also makes a case for the existence of an English encyclopedic literature that has explored the complex relationship between national culture and identity typical of the English territory. In moments of dissolution and national re-definition, the attention is directed inwards, which can lead to the production of works that can be considered “insular”. This, however, is not always the case. By reflecting in fiction the attempts at nation-building, such texts are able to depict a narrow view of English cultural identity as a construct that can be manipulated. By reproducing the order of the nation, novelists are able to warn against its encyclopedic and limited structure, which imposes a binary structure on society. The works examined do not concentrate on a nationalist-inflected Englishness with the aim of supporting it: on the contrary, they contest it by placing this ideology in heterotopian spaces, to a liberatory end. The same cultural notions of English nationalist discourse are employed by the novelists to show that it is possible to revere and love a country's cultural heritage, without turning it into an oppressive tool and excluding those who are “other”. Read together, these works seem to express Krishan Kumar's wish: “if England needs to see itself as a nation, it can show the world that nationalism need not mean narrowness and intolerance”
(2003:272-273).
Chapter I. Discourse and English National Identity
1.1. Michel Foucault's Discourse: Knowledge, Truth, Power
Michel Foucault's archaeological method1 is centred on the analysis of the “sub-soil”, of discourse in its modelling of the archive (Lotringer 1996:27). The archive is a verbal mass, produced by men and woven into their existence and their history. In this analysis, the different bodies of learning of a society, ideas, everyday opinions, institutions and mores refer to a certain specific and implicit knowledge (savoir). This stratum of knowledge, this epistemological field, is what can develop a theory, an opinion, a practice: discourse is the process by which statements have their “conditions of possibility” and their conditions of relation to one another. As such, it is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period and what is actually said, as well as from which position one could delimit, designate, name and define a certain object or category (Lotringer 1996:13-14).
Discourse determines what counts as meaningful, what counts as topic and what counts as truth:
it is knowledge that has been shaped, delimited and authorized through structures that have control over the object of knowledge and decide what can be known and said about it. Since discourses are
“practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 2002:54), they are connected to the theme of identity, because they can delimit or silence an existing category, or create a new one. One example is the shift from the term “sodomy” to “homosexuality”: while the first was a term that indicated all kinds of practices and was used to refer to an isolated crime, the second term indicates an exclusive choice, a part of an individual's subjectivity. To know it is to know a truth about them: that is how a shift in discourse resulted in the creation of a new identity category.2
This aspect of Foucault's method emphasizes the agency of discourse: it represents, changes and reflects the world. As it is embedded in institutions, discourse has a material impact and is able to construct and manipulate the very thing it describes. In this sense, discourse can be said to govern language, speech and representation and to be one of the ways of knowing and categorizing the
1 Foucault first described this methodology in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), but he had applied it in works such as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966).
2 Another significant example is the one made by Liisa Malkki in "Refugees and Exile: From 'Refugee Studies' to the National Order of Things" (1995). Here she locates the birth of “the refugee” and of “refugee studies” in Europe after the Second World War, when they began to be housed in refugee camps and could be identified as objects of socio-scientific knowledge. This led to the systematization of “Refugee Studies”, with the effect of popularizing the essentialism of “the refugee experience” and to posit the existence of a single identity category which replaced the multiplicity of the experiences of actual refugees - who came from vastly different countries and for entirely different reasons.
world (Lotringer 1996:69-70).
Clearly, discourse is intimately connected to power, knowledge and truth, with which it forms a complex, multidirectional network. In the inaugural lecture at the Collège de France given in December 1970 and later published under the title The Order of Discourse (Young 1981), Foucault argues that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures. One of these is exclusion, which plays a fundamental part in two areas, that of sexuality and that of politics. Discourse is one of the places where they exercise their powers, precisely because it is “the thing for which and by which there is struggle: discourse is the power which is to be seized” (1981:53). The same principle of exclusion is the one behind the distinction between true and false, the “stronger, deeper, more implacable” in our society. This “will to truth” generates the division that governs our will to know (notre volonté de savoir) and makes it into “a system of exclusion, a historical, modifiable and institutionally constraining system” (Young 1981:54). Like other systems of exclusion, it rests on an institutional support, as it is reinforced and renewed by whole strata of practices (such as pedagogies, libraries, societies, laboratories) but also by the way in which knowledge is put to work, valorized, distributed and attributed in a society. Because it is so pervasive, it remains hidden: it is a “gentle and insidiously universal force”, and we remain unaware of the will to truth, “that prodigious machinery designed to exclude” (1981:56).
Discourses can also function as internal principles of classification, ordering or distribution.
Commentary, for example, appears in the societies with major narratives, formulae, texts or sets of discourses preserved. A similar function is that of discipline, as it is a set of objects, methods or propositions thought to be true: it is possible to be “in the truth” only by obeying the rules of a discoursive policing. A corollary of this is that disciplines and rituals are principles of control over the production of discourses and that not all the regions of discourse are equally open and penetrable.
Further control is exercised through the societies of discourse, which preserve, produce and circulate discourses in a closed space, distributing them according to strict rules. For example, in Ancient Greece the section of society composed of by the rhapsodists was the only one who had access to the knowledge of poetry. The equivalent in our society can be identified in doctrines, described as the manifestation and the instrument of adherence to class, social status, race, nationality. Doctrine binds individuals to certain types of enunciation, and forbids them all others, and at the same time it binds individuals among themselves and separates them from all others (Young 1981:63-64). Doctrine, then, brings about a double subjection: of the speaking subjects to discourses and of discourses to the speaking subjects. It functions as a closed circle, in which
prohibitions and limits have been constructed out of fear, to master “the great proliferation of discourse”, to organize its uncontrollable disorder in structures which attempt to tame “this great incessant and disordered buzzing of discourse” (Young 1981:66).
In his lecture of 14 January 1976, Foucault explains how power is delimited by rules and how it produces and transmits effects of truths. Such rules and effects in turn reproduce power, thus forming a triangle with power, right and truth as its vertices. Clearly, in such a formation, the social body in our society cannot be established or consolidated without a discourse of truth. Since we are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth, power never ceases its interrogation, its registration of truth: it institutionalizes, professionalizes and rewards its pursuit (Gordon 1980:92-93).
It is important to remember that in speaking of domination, Foucault did not have in mind a global kind of domination that one person or group exercises over others, but rather the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society. It follows that his analysis does not focus on the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations, but rather at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, where it becomes capillary. This means studying power at its “external visage”, where it is in direct relationship with its target, at the intersection in which it produces its real effects: instead of the heart of the Leviathan, we should concentrate on the myriad of bodies which are constituted as peripheral subjects (Gordon 1980:102).
Power must be therefore analysed as something which circulates, as a chain in which it is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. In this chain, individuals are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power: they are both part of its effect and its vehicle.
Significantly, all the major mechanisms of power have been accompanied by the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge – methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research and apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when exercised through these mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organize and put into circulation an apparatus of knowledge. Therefore, it is through the procedure of normalisation that discourses created by disciplines invade the area of right: all this, he concludes, can explain the global functioning of a “society of normalisation” (Gordon 1981:106-107).
Foucault further develops the intersection of power, knowledge and its concrete effect on society in a series of lectures given between 1975 and 1976 and published as Society Must Be Defended.3
3 These lectures propose a genealogical analysis. While archaeology focuses on the epistemological field of an epoch,
These lectures discuss the thin line that divides freedom and constraint in society, and therefore democratic and totalitarian states. Starting from the consideration that power is always a relation of conflict and war, political power can be said to employ the same forces at play in war. Hence Foucault's inversion of Clausewitz's principle4: if war is “the continuation of politics by other means”, then “isn't politics itself a continuation of war by other means?” (Bertani and Fontana 2003:47-48). In both cases, after all, we are dealing with a binary structure running through society.
In such a discourse, only two sides can exist: there cannot be a neutral subject in this context, because the discourse of right is always spoken from a position, from a perspective. This discourse is interested in the totality only to distort it and can only employ truth from its “combat position”:
this establishes a basic link between relations of force and relations of truth (2003:52-54). Truth, then, is an additional force in the exercise of political power: further evidence that politics is the field in which discourses more explicitly exhibit their power.
Significantly, the employment of war as a “grid of intelligibility” for society is linked to historical discourse, and especially to its role in the formation of a nation.5 By means of this grid, it is possible to relate social relations to a historical war and to see political struggles as the continuation of the same war. Therefore, politics (which frames itself as a rational discourse) is explained “on the terms of the confusion of violence, passions, hatreds, rages, resentments and bitterness. […] Fury is being asked to explain calm and order (2003:54). This discourse, despite being grounded in history, is only interested in the “eternal dissolution into the mechanisms and events known as force, power, war”: what it conjures up, in the end, is basically a mix of knowledge and myths:
This mythology tells of how the victories of giants have gradually been forgotten and buried, of the twilight of the gods, of how heroes were wounded or died and of how kings fell asleep in inaccessible caves. We also have the theme of the rights and privileges of the earliest race, which were flouted by cunning invaders, the theme of the war that is still going on in secret, of the plot that has to be revived so as to rekindle that war and to drive out the invaders or enemies, the theme of the famous battle that will take place tomorrow, that will at last invert the relationship of force, and transform the vanquished into victors who will know and show no mercy. [This] will be related to the great, undying hope that the day of revenge is at hand, to the expectation of the emperor of the last years, of the new leader, the new guide […], the man who genealogy is centred on “the small and multiple changes” that occur in the development of thought in a given epoch.
As it is aimed at uncovering the concrete effect of power on the body, it is more politically aware (Downing 2008:15). Lisa Downing explains this shift as Foucault's response to the “reassertion of the imperative for the intellectual to be politically motivated” (2008:10).
4 Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian general. He was the author of Vom Kriege (On War), published posthumously in 1832: the work is “a study of the political nature of war and the distinction between total and limited war”. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran, Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, Princeton University Press (1992 – 2014:5).
5 Foucault argues that during the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, racial duality was history's essential point of articulation (2003: 124-125).
will be both the beast of the Apocalypse and the saviour of the poor. (2003:56-57)
Therefore, “politics-as-war” is a reordering of history, in which the present is explained on the basis of a defining event in the past and aimed at some kind of renaissance in the future. In this mechanism, then, history is “both an operation and an intensifier of power”. This is possible because it functions in the same way as rituals, ceremonies or legendary stories: in short, it presents an image of power that is able to add to its force (Bertani and Fontana 2003:67).
Foucault goes on to identify this procedure as the basis of the conception of the nation. Within the nation, peace is seen as a thin veil covering two sides or two nations at war. Of these “nations”
or “races” (such as aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in eighteenth century France),6 one exercises a sort of domination on the other, which can then rebel by claiming their right to sovereignty by using the discourse of history. Foucault locates the birth of such a discourse in the eighteenth century, when the “nation” became a new subject of knowledge (2003:164). This led first to an increase in the conflicts between nations and, as a consequence, in the employment of history in the discourse of politics and conflict. At this time, Foucault observes, history can aptly be described as “the nation talking about itself” (2003:152).
As time progressed, in the course of the nineteenth century the discourse of history was so
“internalised” that it became possible to use it as an analyser of political relations, characterizing the state as a defender of society both from internal and external threats (Bertani and Fontana 2003:215-216). At this point, Foucault's analysis takes into consideration the techniques of power used by the state to guarantee such a defence, leading to the definition of what he called “bio- power”. Foucault distinguishes between two different strategies at work within a state: the disciplinary and the regulatory one. The first is aimed at controlling “man-as-body”, since it is focused on individuals and sees them as a force to be put to use (Foucault's term is “docile bodies”).
These included all devices meant to ensure “the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, their alignment, their serialization and their surveillance) and the organization, around these individuals, of a whole field of visibility” (2003:242). In effect, these comprise all the devices that were employed in the use of bodies for labour during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The second technique, instead, was needed in the second half of the eighteenth century to deal with
“man-as-species”, that is to say, with the population: it intervenes on a mass of people, on a series of general biological processes. Biopolitics, then, exerts its control on demographic ratios or
6 Foucault uses the term “nation” to speak of two sides of society within one nation, and the term “race”when one unified race is made to “split up” in two, one that claims its superiority and one that resents its inferiority. Later on, he also mentions a “national duality”, in which two hostile groups constitute the “substratum of the state”: this, in France, was Thierry's hypothesis (2003:117 – 118).
endemics, and considers the economic and political problems that they reflect (2003:243). In addition, it includes its control over the environment in which human beings live, whether it is a geographical or an urban problem (2003:245). What he termed “bio-power”, then, is summed up as a series of techniques enacted by the state and that either “make live” or “let die” (2003:244 – 247).
At the end of the lecture, it becomes clear that, although these techniques are heavily employed by totalitarian and racist states, they exist in every Western society. In effect, it is by making use of this perspective of war that the state is authorized to kill7 in order to defend itself and society. In this discourse, “the death of the other makes life healthier”: racism, then, is the fastest way a state can find to enact a regulatory mechanism of normalisation, but the basis for it are already present in any society (2003:256).
In conclusion, in this further exploration of power and politics, Foucault brings to the fore the restricting measures at play within society and within the state. Of particular interest for the purpose of this work, however, is the delineation of a binary logic of war which is used to explain them.
Equally important is the convergence between the employment of historical discourse and regulatory techniques within a state, which Foucault locates in the development of the modern conception of the nation. Clearly, describing history as “the nation talking about itself” points to an interested use of historical knowledge, in which materials are either chosen or ignored in order to justify a certain political stance. As we will see, Foucault's writings on discourse and its powers within the state are echoed in the studies on nationalism and its implications. Recently, the same notions have resurfaced in a British context, where the fear of a “breakup of Britain” and the Brexit limbo can be explained as originating from a specifically English crisis of identity.
1.2. Nationalism and England: Englishness, History and Brexit
The complex network of power, truth and knowledge, with its relationality, multidirectionality and plural effects underpins much of the literature on national identity: since a national culture often selects, frames and distributes a certain narrative, national identity can be thought of as a representation. This means that national identity, when it acquires political undertones, can be studied as a category imposed by and created through cultural imaginaries, rather than derived by a natural formation. In this perspective, the nation comes into being as a representation, an imagined space put into circulation by an apparatus of knowledge that engenders a lasting tradition. Seminal works such as Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (1983) and Nation and Narration by
7 Foucault used the term “to kill” to mean also “expulsion” and “rejection” (2003:257).
Hohmi Bhabha (1990) develop this theme, emphasising the imagined and imaginary status of the nation.
For example, Bhabha, in his preface to Nation and Narration, focussed on a range of readings that engaged the insights of post-structuralist theories of narrative knowledge – textuality, discourse, enunciation, écriture, the unconscious as a language – in order to evoke this ambivalent margin of the nation-space. To reveal such a margin is to contest its claims to cultural supremacy and it is an intervention into those justifications of modernity – progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past – “that rationalize the authoritarian, 'normalizing tendencies' within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative” (2000:4).
In all respects, there are parallels between discourse as Foucault described it and the nation. At the most basic level, the first delimit or name a category, functioning as principles of classification and exclusion, constructing boundaries out of fear, or to master the “uncontrollable buzzing of discourse”. Similarly, the nation sets itself apart from others by naming the Other in opposition to Us, excluding “foreign bodies”8 and constructing walls in defence of its borders for fear of
“swamping” and in order to limit the “swarm”9 of migrants. In order to function, Elizabeth Helsinger argues, “a nation [...] must be able to imagine itself in a certain kind of space, a space that is located and bounded, demarcated by natural and political boundaries separating it from other nations” (qtd. in Ebbatson, 2014:2).
Therefore, in both cases there is an interest in a totality, but only to impose an order upon it. In both cases, subjects (which are also agents) are not aware of these principles, their functioning is invisible, and both rest on and encourage the accumulation or the production of knowledge. And finally, in both cases a binary structure seems to be imposed on society.
These parallels resonate with the writings on national identity in general, but some aspects in particular have been brought into the light by the current political situation in which Britain finds itself after the 2016 Referendum. Today's situation is a perfect example of how a question of national and cultural identity can become a political problem, causing uncertainty and division in the Union. Understanding the reasons for Brexit can be difficult, since, as Varun Uberoi and Iain McLean observe in “Britishness: a Role for the State?” (Gamble and Wright, 2009:41), “politicians,
8 As Lisa Malkki observes in her studies, the nation is often referred to with arboreal metaphors, but also as a family or a body, in which the refugees or the migrants, being excluded, fall by default into the category of the anomaly, of plants that have difficulty in adapting to the “new” soil, or of foreign bodies (1995). Heterology, “the branch of philosophy concerned with the existence of the Other or unknowable thing” , was a term borrowed from the same semantic field: in medical pathology it refers to “morbid, abnormal tissue composed differently from the surrounding healthy tissue” (see the entry on “heterology” , Oxford Reference,
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095934107 , last accessed 22/07/19).
9 In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron described the migrants who were trying to reach Britain in these terms, which compares human beings to undesirable insects. See Ankhi Mukherjiee, “Migrant Britain” in Eaglestone, Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses (2018:73).
journalists and academics often emphasize the importance of Britishness, but it is seldom clear what they are emphasising”. The same could be said for Englishness: in both political and cultural discourse, as David Gervais observed in Literary Englands, “England is too large and too various to be a fixed concept. It has changed so fast in our time that it is hard to be sure, at any given moment, which England is in question, its present or its past” (Gervais, 1996:274-275). Despite this, there is a tension between “a frustrating reticence” and a “chatty explicitness ” about Englishness; it is something that cannot be uttered, and yet the need to define it has been felt and discussed since the end of Empire (Wood, in Rogers and McLeod 2004:59). In both cases there is no universal agreement, and both can indicate, in different contexts, a sense of cultural affiliation, civic nationhood or national identity. Furthermore, “England” and “Britain” have often been used interchangeably, a usage which is due to the peculiar history of English imperial expansion. The shadow of Empire seems to be one of the main reasons for confusion around English and British identity: it seems that Brexit has unearthed problems which link identity of place and history.
Arguments were made to salvage the “purity of the English soil”, augmented by fears of uncontrolled immigration and foreign rule, and both often featured or were justified by a manipulation of historical discourse.
These problems are at the heart of both English and British identity. Therefore, it might be useful to take a longer view of English nationalism. Following Anthony Smith's distinction between nationalism as “a form of culture and identity” and as a force with its political impact (1991:71), in The Making of English National Identity (2003) Krishan Kumar traces the origin of the confusion surrounding English nationalism to England's dominion first over the British Isles and then over the Empire. In his accurate reconstruction, the imperial project provided the region with a missionary or imperial identity, which turned Great Britain into the theatre in which the English could find a role for themselves, without losing their distinctiveness. This did not come without a price, as the identification with its imperialistic projects kept England from the search of an English national identity as a separate, political entity: With the extension of English nationality into a world-historic role, there was no need for the assertion of a separate English identity.10 Empire, industry, progress, science, civilization were all contained in Englishness, the core of the world-transforming movement. The Empire was also possible thanks to the industry's capacity to provide trade companies and the navy with advanced ships, and it expanded by transplanting its innovations (the railway) and institutions (the country house, the museum, the public school and cricket fields) on foreign soils.11 However, in celebrating all its achievements, this discourse never celebrated England
10 Another reason for the lack of English propaganda is that it was felt to be a counterproductive policy, especially at an intellectual and ideological level: it was “impolite to crow” (2003:185-186).
11 These are also the “quintessentially English locales” discussed by Ian Baucom in Out of Place, 1999.
as a separated political entity: Englishness was celebrated as a “national character” alongside the public project of the Empire. It was mainly a cultural celebration of English history, intellectual and political traditions, literature and landscape; an ethnic and cultural national identity that flanked a more dominant, civic discourse of Britishness. The latter was associated with Empire, and as it declined (a process which began in the late nineteenth century, Kumar 2003:197) the missionary role that was at the basis of the imperial project was put into question. In this, the Boer War was the event that more than any other “destroyed the confidence that Englishmen of all class and persuasion had had in their empire. The “morally indefensible” nature of the war, the employment of the first concentration camps, all led to a “growing revulsion among many thinkers and statesmen” (2003:198).12 The loss of confidence, then, was accompanied by ideas of decline and decadence popular with European artists and intellectuals of the fin-de-siècle. All this played a part in the inward turn, the “self-questioning” found in English life and fiction at the end of the nineteenth century (2003:198-199). In fiction, this shift was registered, among others, by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), with its ambiguous depiction of the colonial enterprise.
This simultaneously rural, domestic vision of the mother country and its imperial delineation, then, existed side by side, but their relationship is far from straightforward: the Empire did not only provide a stage for English identity. As Ian Baucom explains, expanding the territory in which Englishness could be performed, inscribing “quintessentially” English places on foreign soils, was also problematic, a cause for concern and rejection of the Empire itself. For example, one of the consequences of the Empire was the creation of a zone of “occult instability” (Bhabha, qtd. in Baucom, 1999:3): precisely because Englishness was defined through the “identity-endowing property of place”, the struggle to define, defend or reform Englishness took the form of struggles to order or disorder the nation's and the empire's spaces. But these spatial struggles were also temporal contests to determine the meaning and authority of the English past: the English place made the past visible, testifying the nation's continuity across time (1999:4-13). If English places are “lieux de mémoire”,13 where England can locate or preserve its identity, then Englishness could be modified, acquired or lost. In this context, Englishness could survive intact only by denying the
12 Kumar cites J. A. Hobson's Imperialism (1902) as the most influential critiques written at this time (2003:198).
13 Adapting Pierre Nora's notion of the lieu de mémoire, Baucom describes a place or a locale, that has the capacity to make the past visible and render it present. Nora had discussed them in his essay “Between Memory and History”:
Les Lieux de Mémoire”. In it, Nora draws a distinction between milieux and lieux de mémoire: the distinction between environments and places of memory is connected to the one between history and memory: for Nora, history is historiography or historicism (a sceptical and “deauraticized knowledge of the past”, Baucom 1999:18). Memory, on the other hand, is demanding and it defines who we are. For Nora, Memory has survived historicism and remains as a trace, “a lingering scent haunting certain prized lieux de mémoire” (18). These can be topographic, monumental or textual and they are where the past survives as a fetish of itself. As Baucom concludes, they are “cultic phenomena, … the jealously guarded ruins of cultural ensembles possessed by a need to stop time or, better yet, to launch a voyage of return to the past” (1999:19).
Empire itself. It was only by associating it with British spaces and British subjects that England was able to simultaneously avow and disavow the empire: British space is homogeneous, interchangeable, everywhere alike, while English space remained unique, local, differentiated, so that the empire could remain within the bounds of Britishness but outside those of Englishness (1999:17-20). Although the British Empire was subjected to strain in the twentieth century, it continued to play a part in British consciousness even after its collapse became evident:
In stories, poems, films, plays; in imperial exhibitions such as the 1924 Wembley Exhibition, in the pageantry and spectacle of imperial monarchy, in the celebration of Empire Day, in the participation of troops from the empire in two world wars, in the presence of people from the empire within the United Kingdom itself: in all these ways the British were daily reminded that they were an imperial people.
(Kumar 2003:235)
This parallel, the development of a solely English cultural affiliation in strained collaboration with British infrastructures continued after 1947, the post-war era, in which much of the economy was based on British companies such as the British Coal Corporation, British Gas, British Steel or British Rail. This continued in the 1970s and 1980s, which saw the collapse of British power on a global level. In this context, the condition of England was framed as a “condition of Britain”
question (Kumar 2003:236). These two delineations, then, developed side by side: under a British civic sense of nationality (with strong links engendered by the BBC and its affiliation to the monarchy), England retained its predominance in the kingdom and its cultural discourse, traditions and institutions continued to be cultivated in the twentieth century (2003:200). This was promoted by public-school then Oxbridge-educated gentlemen and therefore excluded many social groups.
Promoting a selective view of the nation's past and of its essentially English qualities, it led to cultural revivals in the first decades of the 1900s, and it shaped and selected a narrative of history and a specific region of the country as essentially English (Colls and Dodd, 2014:28-30). This marked narrowing of focus meant that, especially in times of crisis, English writers and poets turned to the “'south country', therefore Kent, Sussex, Wiltshire, Somerset, Hampshire and Dorset” (Kumar 2003:209). These regions were the heart of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom and became the emblem of a certain kind of Englishness: “it is a land of small towns and cathedral cities set among green rolling hills, interspersed here and there with the ruins of an old castle or abbey; sheep dot the countryside, small streams meander through it” (2003:209). Reproduced in paintings and used as propaganda in later years, this image contained the concept of a timeless England, “cut off not just from Britain but from much of the rest of England, the England of the Midlands and the North” as well as London, the centre of the nation (2003:209-211).14
14 Part of this current of pastoralism is Hardy's popularity as an “English annalist” or William Morris' depiction of an
However, this dominant discourse of Englishness was not encased in a nationalistic project, both during and after the brutality of the Wars. The “turn to England”, in Kumar's view, was also caused by a longing for serenity: this could only be found in the timeless English countryside. Recycling myths of England's rural past and seeking refuge from the modern, brutal world, England was reduced to the idyllic South Country of the War Poets, recalled with nostalgia or described with fervour. This limited view reduced the country to a timeless garden, in opposition to the metropolis, which represented modernity and cosmopolitanism. Despite the influence of the anti-industrial movement and the permanence of the image of a pastoral England in English cultural and political life during the Second World War, this period proved to be the apex of British civic nationalism.
The conflict united the country against a common enemy, in defence of a set of values that set it in opposition to the German threat. In Winston Churchill's vision, Britain was to be the defender of justice and equality: his was an entirely British propaganda (Kumar 2003:233 -234), proving that, although a portion of the Union was averse to imperialism and modernity, it could be summoned together to fight a common enemy. The rural image constructed through literature could be summoned in order to spur the English to the defence of their country, as it had been during the First World War. George Orwell, in 1941, described the prompt national mobilisation in the event of Dunkirk in his essay “England Your England” in the same terms:
After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous action – and, then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep”. (Orwell, 1984:75)
Overtly political nationalism, instead, was treated with suspicion, after Nazism had proved the violence and the massacres it engendered. In opposition to the inhumanity associated with nationalism, then, the English praised ordinary people and their virtue, which would all enter the collective imagination as “English” qualities: calm, fortitude and cheerful stoicism in the face of danger15 (2003:230-233).
It was the second half of the twentieth century that would bring about a series of profound transformations in British society: one of the most decisive turning points was the collapse of
archaic England equated with utopia in News from Nowhere (1890) (Kumar 2003:211), as well as the “Back to Land” movement, espoused by Edward Carpenter among others. As Lord Milner wrote in 1911, this view “appealed to serious men of every hue of political thought”. In the same way, this is linked to the tendency in English modernism to identify with cosmopolitan views, rather than inward looking positions. In politics, the party that more readily identified with the cultural discourse of Englishness and with pastoralism was that of the Conservatives: with its stress on notions of continuity, deference and hierarchy, it could summon up reassuring memories of “Old England” and the glories of the English past. Liberal thinking too acquired some material from this version of Englishness and presented instead as a kind of patriotism (Kumar 2003:213).
15 These are the same qualities that fed into the myth of Britain “standing alone”, in a sort of reiteration of the myth of English or British exceptionalism.
Empire and the subsequent wave of immigration. These were followed by devolution, as well as by the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalism. In effect, nationalism in Scotland and Wales and the urgency to solve the Irish Question weakened the supremacy of the Parliament in Westminster. This meant that devolution could potentially undermine “the whole constitutional arrangement by which Britain has been governed for the past three centuries” (Kumar 2003:240). Lastly, the Irish Question and the entry into the European Union with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991 seemed to confirm that the great era of the British nation was coming to an end. These processes had a great impact on the sense of British civic identity, which started to differentiate itself from British nationalism and, in addition, allowed a sense of English nationalism to emerge. In Kumar's words, it was when English enterprises began to falter that a degree of English self-consciousness began to emerge16 and to claim political agency (2003:224 -225). This was accompanied by a narrative of decline, of both sides: that of the Union and Englishness. In many quarters, for example, the entry into the European Union seemed to herald the loss of British parliamentary sovereignty and the end of British independence (2003: 226).
In addition, Britain was faced with the question of immigration: for a section of the population, the black and Asian components of the community proved to be a challenge to existing identities,
“despite the fact that they make up no more than seven per cent of the total British population”
(Kumar 2003:241). Being under pressure on all sides, these elements all combine, in Kumar's view, to make the English “man the barricades” (Kumar 2003:242).
With regard to the legacies of empire, the political expression of exclusionary discourses began to emerge after 1948, when the first British Nationality Act was passed. This, according to Ian Baucom, was “the last act to assert the global dimensions of Britain and Britishness” (Baucom, 1999:9). In England, national status had traditionally been granted by the ius soli, which had prescriptive authority. Then, intermittently before and programmatically after the 1960s, the state abandoned spatial and territorial ideologies for a racial discourse of loyalty and co-identity, which was ratified by Edward Heath's 1971 Immigration Act and finally by the 1981 Nationality Act. This stated that Britishness was to be identified as an inheritance of race, therefore privileging the
“native” inhabitants of the island against the “newly” arrived (Baucom, 1999:9-10). These defensive measures show that Anglocentric constructions of Britishness may erase the cultural identity of the British subjects who are not English but, at the same time, “Britishness, with its openness to the other, can also menace Englishness” (1999:14). This is why Enoch Powell took a
16 In Smith's definition of nationalism as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation”
(1991:71), then, in the case of English nationalism the key word is “potential”. A cultural idea of England seems to have been quietly cultivated, but it remained dormant until the weather changed, and made it develop its political force.
defensive stance against an imperial history that affirmed the equivalence of all the subjects of the empire. For him, Englishness was a question of race: it meant whiteness, command of the English language and rootedness in a domestic space, separated from the empire and its hybridity (1999:15).
In this view, the immigrants are dangerous because they can “remake” space, and if place is transformed, so is Englishness (Baucom, 1999:23). For the same reasons, Margaret Thatcher's discourse reverted to nostalgic “Victorian values” (an expression used by Raphael Samuel as the title of his 1992 essay on the ex Prime Minister). Powell, the only post-war politician to “take questions of national identity seriously” (Nairn, qtd. in Kumar 2003:267), is generally viewed as racist. Instead, in Kumar's view he is “an English nationalist”, who believes that there is a timeless, Old English national culture which has persisted, unaltered, over centuries; and it is this the one that
“he wishes to preserve against the threat of swamping posed by large-scale immigration, with its non-English ways; by the same token, its very antiquity and solidity make it impossible for any but very small numbers of non-English people to be integrated or assimilated into English culture”
(Kumar 2003:267).
The country faced the same fears when it entered the European Union. In 1992, John Major, for example, defensively stated that he “would never let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe: you cannot bully Britain” (qtd. in Kumar 2003:226-227). Therefore, resistance on the part of a vast section of the population indicated that an undermined British civic nationalism17 and an increasingly exclusive English nationalistic discourse were incapable of turning the European stage into an instrument of unification. Nor could it be seen by the majority of the country as an opportunity to expand its identity on a larger scale again: unlike Scotland and Ireland, countries with a previous history of relation to the continent, the English are the ones who, since the eighteenth century, have developed the strongest sense of themselves as a people with an imperial, oceanic destiny. It follows that their ambitions looked towards the United States, rather than Europe. In this long tradition of Eurosceptic debates, what prevailed was the fear of swamping, dilution and assault by immigrants. Furthermore, entering the European Union was seen as a concession of sovereignty to a foreign power: in the Union, it is the English who most fear that
“their identity will go away” (Kumar 2003:270-271). This was made plain, among others, by Paul Johnson, former editor of the New Statesman. In 1995, commenting on John Major's conservative government, he stated that national feeling depends on a feeling of oppression. In his right-wing view, the English, having for long been top nation, had never had a reason to think about their national identity. That was now changing: “now that the English are themselves oppressed, for the
17 Encapsulated by the fear of a “break-up of Britain” lasting to this day. Even less pessimistic approaches tend to affirm that “being British is less easy than it was, because the state which underpinned British identity is no longer the confident structure of earlier times” (Gamble and Wright, 2009:1).
