In search of common ground: landscape and place-identity in contemporary British folk

Abstract

This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk, one that affords a means of exploring new forms of post-national identity in Britain. While folk has engaged with questions of national identity, articulating multiculturalist positions, much recent work focuses on individual attachments to landscapes understood as both repositories of highly personal meaning and sites of universal experience. Through a discourse analysis of the popular podcast Folk on Foot (a key space for the development of this emerging discursive strand), I argue that the diminished emphasis on questions of Englishness or Britishness does not indicate a retreat from questions of cultural identity as such. Rather, the programme seeks to sketch out a post-national understanding of belonging in the landscape, one that de-emphasises cultural and ethnic differences within contemporary Britain, and focusses instead on common experiences of attachment to place and landscape that are thought to transcend notions of collective identity as bounded by national borders.

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