The agonistic imagination: the illiberal and pluralist possibilities of contemporary BrexLit fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores recent work of Zadie Smith (‘The Embassy if Cambodia’, 2013, and ‘The Lazy River’, 2019) and David Szalay (All That Man Is, 2016), as examples of BrexLit fiction, a term coined by Kristian Shaw to denote ‘fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude, to Britain’s exit from the EU’. In contrast to the nineteenth century state-of-the-nation novel, which drew upon the liberal-humanist resources of the novel to intervene in public debates, I contend that a significant strand of contemporary BrexLit reflects a crisis not simply within but rather of the public sphere. Accordingly, my case studies hit upon the limits of the liberal literary tradition and they do so precisely as a means to explore the deficiencies of the mainstream liberal response to populism. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s post-political thesis – the argument that the representative systems of European democracies have capitulated to a technocratic-centrist inertia based on the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization – this essay claims that BrexLit offers a generic framework for thinking through an alternative agonistic imagination; a way of thinking and writing that offers a way for redeeming an illiberal politics for progressive rather than reactionary ends.