Racial nationalisms: Brexit, borders and Little Englander contradictions

Abstract

This Introduction first proposes a definitional map applicable to the racial nationalisms currently ascendant in Britain (and Western Europe, more broadly). The paper then outlines the respective contributions to the Special Issue – with an emphasis on the politics of bordering that organizes today so much of nationalism's claim on the state. The second half thereupon establishes a wider conjunctural context within which such analyses can be most productively read. Drawing on Stuart Hall's formative analysis, we argue that it is an understanding of the distinctly contradictory drives intrinsic to recent capitalism that is required. Through mapping the uneasy nation/market bind constitutive of the “Little Englander” political subjectivity that Thatcherism forged, this section focuses on the “disjuncture” that has emerged in the intervening period: a disjuncture, compounded by complementary forms of “postcolonial melancholia”, that has seen the various nationalist drives in the body politic obtain today a more pronounced political autonomy.

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