Abstract
The debate that overtook Scottish society in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence featured the participation of Scottish artists, writers and literary critics in ways that stand in stark contrast to the utter cultural silence with which Brexit has been met in the Scottish literary scene. This article will seek to answer a two-fold question: what can contemporary trends in Scottish literary studies tell us about the political constitution of our discipline(s), and what can they tell us about our contemporary political conjuncture? In order to explore these issues, my investigation will map out the silences, interventions and (dis)engagements that have characterised the response to Brexit and the Indyref by Scottish literary studies and by Scottish writing. I will examine these in relation both to the politics of contextualism and the nationed disciplinary framework that define Scottish literature as a field of study, and to the post-postnational, sovereignist conjuncture of which both the Indyref and Brexit are manifestations. Gauging the differential interest that the Indyref and Brexit have generated in Scottish literature on the one hand, and its relationship to the political moment we are traversing on the other, provides fundamental insights into the political constitution of the discipline.
Highlights
Kristian Shaw has developed the concept of BrexLit to describe ‘fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude to Britain’s exit from the EU, or engage with the subsequent socio-cultural, economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain’s withdrawal’ (Shaw, 2017: 18)
No public event or publication has explicitly considered the relationship between Brexit and Scottish literature, there have been talks that have engaged with the European dimensions of Scottish literature and possibly point to the only way in which Brexit can be registered in Scottish culture – as disconnected from the political sphere
In September 2019 an event was organised to discuss the ‘Indyref: Culture and Politics Five Years On’. This offered an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of the Indyref and to critically examine the constraints that constitutional politics imposes on the contribution of artists and writers, as well as on grassroots movements committed to its same aims
Summary
Kristian Shaw has developed the concept of BrexLit to describe ‘fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude to Britain’s exit from the EU, or engage with the subsequent socio-cultural, economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain’s withdrawal’ (Shaw, 2017: 18). Brexit has drawn no explicit dramatisation as an event relevant to Scotland in Scottish writing Such silence stands in stark contrast to the considerable extent to which the debate that overtook Scottish society in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence featured the participation of Scottish artists, writers and literary critics. A contextualist orientation, namely one which in theorizing the relationship between theory and politics posits a mutual influence between cultural and political spaces, in a Scottish context is inseparable from a post-Indyref perspective The latter offers an optic that acknowledges the Indyref both as having revolutionised the boundaries of what could be imagined in Scottish culture, literature and politics and as still functioning as a point of reference in cultural and political spaces. My intention will not be to reduce the scope of the field to engagement with contemporary writing or contexts, but to explore the critical possibilities of contextualism from a situated point in time and space
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