“Politics of racism” and BrexLit: Questioning the racially labelled entities in Ali Smith’s Autumn

Abstract

ABSTRACT Racism sits at the centre of the UK’s debates about Brexit and BrexLit. Contemporary commentators have tended to reduce to racial issues the intricate economic and political aspirations of Brexit supporters in 2016. Ali Smith’s Autumn, for example, a prominent example of Brexit fiction, is generally believed to represent racist bias in dealing with Brexit, through two encounters – the fence scene and the passport episode – seen as embodying working class racism against immigrants in rural England. This article argues instead that such earlier interpretations of Autumn are limited by the so-called “politics of racism”, used to define working class worries about uncontrolled immigration unleashed by global capitalism. Referring to the aesthetic style of the collage created by Pauline Boty, an avant-garde painter of 1960s Britain, whose work is elevated in the novel as an illuminating discovery by the protagonist, Elisabeth, it proposes an alternative interpretation that highlights inclusiveness above all.