British Identity Research Articles

Vive le defecteur!’ an analysis of the British media’s construction of Greg Rusedski’s national identity in the 1990s/2000s

ABSTRACTThis paper concerns the former professional tennis player from 1991 to 2007, Greg Rusedski, who was born in Canada but shifted national allegiance to Great Britain in 1995. Despite an impressive playing career, that saw him reach the US Open final in 1997 and attain a world-number-four ranking, alongside his steadfast efforts to ingratiate himself to the broader public, Rusedski’s British identity remained contested throughout his career. Focusing on four mainstream newspapers covering the political left and right, this paper analyses the British media’s treatment of Rusedski, and aims to develop an understanding of how his constructed identity as more or less ‘British’ fluctuated so markedly throughout his career. While his on-court results were certainly a factor in Rusedski’s swings between acceptance and rejection, this paper suggests a more nuanced analysis that takes into account, firstly, how Rusedski was positioned and characterised in relation to his countryman, the ‘quintessential Englishman’ Tim Henman, particularly in relation to his accent, ostensible personality, personal appearance and physique, and playing style, and, secondly, how Rusedski’s key period of success, in the latter half of 1997, can be contextualised in the light of broader socio-political events and developments.

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, ed. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

This book is the outcome of the first international bi-annual symposium on early modern Catholicism that was jointly run by the University of Durham and the University of Notre Dame in 2013. The two editors, James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, state in the introduction that the purpose of the collection is to establish that early modern English Catholicism can be defined through three key themes—identity, memory and counter-reformation—and this aim is generally achieved throughout the volume. The first part of the book deals with how English Catholics sought to preserve their religious and national identity. Brad Gregory’s essay on situating early modern English Catholicism asserts that English Catholic identity was affected by chronology, geography and the sociological and theological aspects of Catholicism in the early decades after the Reformation, affirming that ‘English Catholicism’ included Welsh, Irish and Scottish Catholics. Gregory’s central claim is that English Catholicism can only be understood by seeing it as a part of European history, and he disputes John Bossy’s hypothesis that post-Reformation English Catholicism did not exist until 1570. Gabriel Glickman’s chapter examines how Catholics explored the concept of British identity in the long eighteenth century. Glickman convincingly demonstrates that, despite the complex relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland which pre-dated the Reformation, mutual cultural relations between these countries allowed networks, commerce and devotional ideas to be exchanged domestically and internationally. The other two chapters scrutinise the ways in which religious orders constructed English Catholic identity. James E. Kelly’s chapter describes English convents in Europe offering an avenue for nuns to preserve their English Catholic identity by acting as receptacles for the growing demand in relic collecting; he provides numerous examples of nuns rescuing relics from destruction, which they then used as aids to memorialise the Catholic Church’s history. Thomas M. McCoog’s chapter on the Society of Jesus and the vicars apostolic contends that the English secular clergy exploited the suppression of the Jesuits in Liège and St Omers for the benefit of their own seminaries, which showed how these fractious relationships had an impact on English Catholic identity.

Pre-service elementary English teacher identities and factors that affect them: Perspectives from in-service teachers.

Pre-service elementary English teacher identities and factors that affect them: Perspectives from in-service teachers.

N. Kondratiev’s Long Waves and Cultural and Linguistic Changes

The article examines the correlations between economic matters and cultural ones. It describes a variety of scientific views aimed at understanding the synergetic relations of economic issues to social phenomena, including cultural and linguistic identity. Besides, it gives an analysis of outstanding scientists works who exercise a multi-sided approach to correlations between economic patterns and different social phenomena, from demography to history, when the theory of economic cycles is used as a research approach and instrumental tool. Special attention is paid to linguistic factors which reflect economic changes and store them in the vocabulary. The emphasis is made on how different linguistic mechanisms reflect socio-economic changes within the theory of long cycles. The research contains a case-study analysis of English identity, evolving together with Britain’s technological growth and technology. The author suggests some linguistic mechanisms that imply economic development or stagnation (borrowings, conversion, affixation, composition, terminology, shortening). A conclusion is made about the effectiveness of economic - linguistic correlations as the latter reflect the history of economic changes as well as contain some forecasts about the nearest future of the national community.

The isles of wonder—a new Jerusalem? British newspaper narratives about the opening ceremony of the XXXth Olympiad

The Isles of Wonder, the 2012 London Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, was viewed by a record global audience either live or through a range of electronic, social, and print media. British newspaper discourses provided reflection of the mega-sporting event as a ‘second-order’ construction, which gave readers an opportunity to reflexively decide what Britishness had come to represent. Theoretical insights about British identity were drawn from Anderson’s (1983) concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) social identity theory, and Edmunds and Turner’s (2001) juxtaposition of benign and malign nationalism. Our qualitative textual analysis revealed that although at times complex, contested, and contradictory, the narratives generally linked the internationalism of the Olympics with a progressive, benign version of Britishness that was still ‘great’. Underpinned by the aspirational New Jerusalem theme, the narratives generally acclaimed the Isles of Wonder as Britain’s first gold medal of the Games.

Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) and Mantle

America’s native peoples have been forced to be both inner and outer emigrants since the arrival of Europeans, including British, to Turtle Island. The founding of the United States was arguably the first Brexit, with the following twist: the violent withdrawal of British colonists from the kingdom of Great Britain was also a wholesale withdrawal of British identity in favour of an ‘American’ identity conjured from opposition to taxes and a race war for Indian land. During that British civil war George Washington, known as Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) in our Iroquois language, sent his generals on a scorched-earth campaign calling for ‘the total destruction and devastation of their settlements… that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed’. Fifty of our villages, and extensive farm fields, storehouses and orchards, were burned to the ground. More than five thousand of our Haudenosaunee ancestors fled as war refugees, homeless, hungry and dispossessed, from their own lands.Mantle is a large-scale, site-specific earthwork honouring Virginia’s Native American nations that has recently been dedicated onsite at the Capitol in Richmond. I based its form on the shell beadwork of Powhatan’s Mantle, the deerskin object in the Ashmolean Museum thought to be part of Powhatan’s gift to King James in 1608, its thirty-odd spiral-embroidered disks are symbols of the villages and tribes of his chiefdom.In an uncharacteristic move in January, Trump signed a bill granting long-overdue federal recognition to six of Virginia’s tribes. Despite this gesture, the Trump administration has proven as hostile to America’s Native peoples as it is to its current immigrants – through its rushed approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline, threatening of sacred sites by shrinking Bears Ears National Monument, and a plan to impose work requirements on Native American Medicaid recipients in direct violation of treaties.

‘Hong Kong is my Home’: The 1940 Evacuation and Hong Kong-Britons

ABSTRACTWho were the Hong Kong British, and where did they live? This question sat at the heart of anguished and angry debates prompted by the colonial government’s edict in June 1940 ordering the evacuation to Australia of all women and children of ‘pure European descent’. In this article, I focus on thematic strands in the debate on Hong Kong British identity, such as race, class, legal domicile, reputation and migration, to explore the complex character of such British communities outside the Dominions. This article aims to characterise what it meant to be British in the wider empire, and deepen our understanding about the place of such communities in the picture of colonial migration.

From Belsen to Gaza: The Promise (2011), British and British-Jewish identity

ABSTRACTThis article discusses Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and investigates the intense public responses it engendered in Britain. The first part of the article explores how the miniseries takes the lead from the liberation of Belsen to engage with issues of British national self-perception. Drawing on the notion of ‘postimperial melancholia’, the article argues that The Promise explores important issues related to Britain’s past and present, in particular the lasting heritage of Empire. The second part engages with the intense reception of the miniseries among opinion makers and the general public, with many critics seeing The Promise as aimed at delegitimising the State of Israel. In thus doing, the article situates the debate within broader discussions on the supposed relationship between anti-Zionism and “new anti-Semitism”, and more specifically discussion of the role of anti-Zionist Jews. The debate around The Promise is a case study for the exploration of two related controversies. The first one pertains to Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular regarding the international role of Israel in the twenty-first century. The second one is more specifically infra-Jewish and revolves around the issue of which subjects are legitimate to speak out as Jews and in the name of which values.

Beyond Islamophobia? The role of Englishness and English national identity within English Defence League discourse and politics

ABSTRACTUnsurprisingly, most scholarship on the English Defence League (EDL) focuses on the Islamophobic nature of the group's politics. This has found that, whilst the group presents a more moderate, public-facing image, the EDL's backstage discourse is a far less nuanced brand of Islamophobia and cultural racism (Allen, C. (2011). Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League. Patterns of Prejudice, 45(4), 279–294; Kassimeris, G., & Jackson, L. (2015). The ideology and discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17, 171–188). A more fundamental area of EDL ideology has been left unexamined, however: what notion of ‘England’ is the EDL trying to ‘defend’? Using content analysis of EDL online discourse, this article examines how the EDL articulates, represents, and uses English national identity within its discourse and politics.

“Do not kill them, lest my people forget”: Changes in Attitudes Towards Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England

This essay supports Paul Hyams’ thesis that while attitudes toward Jews over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certainly cooled, they did so less dramatically or inevitably than the 1290 expulsion might suggest if imagined as a culmination of policy. Chronicled hostility, alongside which the Jewish ‘blood libel’ myth developed as justification, appears to have increased with perceived Jewish economic status. Their status after their impoverishment decreased as royal policy perpetuated longstanding social divisions that largely originated from neither religious nor economic cleavages, only cultural ones. The treatment of the Jews in the period may simultaneously be understood as one of English identity consolidation in the post-Conquest period, as Jews first coexisted with Anglo-Saxons after the Norman invasion. Since economic reasoning alone does not explain the treatment of the Jews in the latter half of the thirteenth century, this essay also examines instances of anti-Jewish violence and successive Plantagenet king’s policies targeting the Jews and understands them as indicators or constructions of religious and national alterity.

Beyond the Border: The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unity after Brexit by Richard Humphreys (review)

Fergus A D’Arcy is professor emeritus in modern history of University College Dublin. His biography of Fr John Spratt O Carm, Raising Dublin, Raising Ireland: A Friar’s Campaign, has just been published. Beyond the Border: The Good FridayAgreement and Irish Unity after Brexit, Richard Humphreys (Newbridge, Ireland: Merrion Press, 2018), 250 pages. What does the Good Friday Agreement really mean? How might the constitutional status of Northern Ireland be changed? Have those who call for Irish unity really thought about what they mean? I have just finished reading Beyond the Border: The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unity after Brexit, by Richard Humphreys. The author is an Irish high court judge and was a legal advisor to the Fine Gael/Labour/ Democratic Left government. The book explores the meaning of the Good Friday Agreement. It explains that its terms will still apply after Brexit and would still apply, even if Northern Ireland ceased to be part of the UK and joined a united Ireland . The Agreement’s requirements mean that the Stormont institutions, its protections for minority interests and its requirement of respect for both identities would continue after unity. The author favours Irish unity but acknowledges that there will be a continuing UK interest in Ireland even if this happens. He presumes there would be support for unity in the Republic. In this, he relies on Article 3.1 of the Irish constitution, which states this to be the ‘firm will’ of the Irish people, if consent has also been obtained in Northern Ireland. He argues that a 50% +1 vote majority in a poll in Northern Ireland is sufficient to bring this about. Legally, that may be so, but it is hardly enough. It is really surprising that the Brexit experience, of setting out on a major constitutional change, on the strength of a narrow majority in a referendum, has not prompted some rethinking on the author’s part. He does not explore the extra taxation that might have to be paid by the southern taxpayer to replace the current UK subsidy to Northern Ireland, in the event that sovereignty moved from Westminster to Dublin. Nor does he even mention the potential extra security provisions that would be made by the Irish taxpayer, to enforce Irish unity of any kind in places like Ballymena, East Belfast and Portadown (unless, of course, the locals wanted it). After Autumn 2018: Book Reviews Studies • volume 107 • number 427 389 all, effective democratic government requires more than just the will of the majority, it also needs the at least passive assent of the minority. Faced with these realities, the ‘firm will’ for unity in the Republic might not be so firm after all. These omissions expose the limitations of a purely legalistic approach. Judge Humphreys deals with the things an Irish government would have to do to recognise the ‘British identity’ of unionists within Ireland. He argues that these things should be done in any event and long in advance of any border poll, and should not be used as a bargaining counter in negotiations with unionists. He suggests, for example, reactivating Irish membership of the Commonwealth. He adds that there should be appropriate measures ‘to recognise and cherish the British identity within the twenty-six county state’. An opportunity to demonstrate this will arise in the commemoration of the war in Ireland between 1919 and 1921. It is important that casualties on both sides are remembered, those who fought for retaining a link with Britain as well as those who fought against it. Many of the former were Irish, from both the unionist and nationalist traditions, especially members of the RIC. Judge Humphreys points out that, under the Good Friday Agreement in the event of unity, unionists should be able to retain UK citizenship while also being able to avail of all the rights of Irish citizenship. My own sense is that active east/west cooperation on joint projects with Britain would be a big help to mitigate a unionist feeling of isolation, whether or not Irish unity is being contemplated. In that sense the reactivation of the British/Irish Intergovernmental Conference is an important step, especially as Brexit...

England, Englishness and the Labour Party

AbstractRecent research has indicated that English identity was a strong predictor for a Leave vote in the referendum on membership of the European Union, and that it is an identity that is increasingly playing a role in British politics. In this paper, we explore whether Englishness affects even left‐right positioning of parties. Focusing on Labour, we find that it does, even controlling for other attitudinal and demographic variables. Alongside age and perceptions of the party leader, perceptions of immigration change and perceived lack of political efficacy also play a significant role. Given the potential electoral significance of this, we reflect on and propose a range of policy options that Labour could utilise to address this gap between English‐identifiers and the party.

The age of the Cambro-Britons: hyphenated British identities in the seventeenth century

ABSTRACTIn the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Welsh writers including the antiquary Humphrey Llwyd, the bard Gruffudd Hiraethog, and the epigrammatist John Owen began referring to themselves as Cambro-Britons. The term was quickly adopted and popularised by English writers, often in ways that show an imperfect grasp of the intentions behind the hyphenated phrase. Whereas the Welsh had hoped that the English and Scots would adopt similar hyphenated identities, English writers tended to interpret “Cambro-Briton” as an intensified and potentially comical expression of Welshness. Though Welsh writers largely ceased to employ the term after the 1620s, the use and misuse of “Cambro-Briton” in English texts continued unabated throughout the century.

Jewish Villains and Basque Heroes: Ethnic Identities and National Narratives in Francisco Navarro Villoslada’s Amaya, o los vascos del siglo VIII

This article examines the portrayal of Jewish characters in Francisco Navarro Villoslada’s Amaya o los vascos en el siglo VIII (1879). The analysis includes a comparison of the Spanish novel with its literary model, Ivanhoe (1820) by Walter Scott. Both novels place Jewish protagonists at the centre of historical moments of emerging nationhood. By contrasting Amaya with Ivanhoe, the article explores the different role of Jewishness in this process. Whereas Scott stakes a claim for an English identity rooted in hybridity, the Spanish author struggles with the diversity of origins in Spanish society. There is a contradiction in the novel between its desire to seek the roots of Basque nationhood in early pagan myths and the author’s vision of a unified Spanish identity rooted in Catholicism. The article suggests that the negative portrayal of the Jew in Amaya is an attempt to resolve this tension by use of the Other.

Imagining Englishness through contested English landscapes

This article adds to current debates on the nature of English identity through examining some of what Kathleen Stewart calls the ‘incommensurate qualities that … link complexly’ to create a certain feel of a place. Based on the premise that landscape and the story of the landscape, its history, are key elements of a national identity, the article explores the shaping of an imagined community of England through memory, forgetting and ‘official’ stories by using the examples of three specific but mundane places in north west England. One is urban ex-industrial, one a formerly industrial but rural site and one rural agricultural. These stories are unravelled to show how the landscapes are integrated ‘taskscapes’ where both national and local identities are performed. Class and race are hidden behind essentialised notions of Englishness. These exemplify a particular moral vision of English landscapes as natural and timeless countryside that serves to sideline urban and working landscapes and their populations. The article proposes treating a ‘taskscape’ as a gift to future generations, thus enabling all those who are a part of the present taskscape to belong.

Blake and Exhibitions, 2017

The works by Blake on display in 2017 span his trajectory from early modern esoteric traditions to his role as a critic of technology and power in late twentieth-century countercultures. An exhibition on the mystical philosophy of Jacob Böhme in Dresden featured some of Blake’s watercolor illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts among works tracing the reception of Böhme from the Corpus Hermeticum to Itten, Marc, Kandinsky, Arp, and the Bauhaus in the early twentieth century. The Blakes displayed in Dresden illustrated the planetary iconography of the late Nights of Young’s poem, the tension between light and darkness, and the earthly and heavenly possibilities of the human form. Seen in the context of the visual apparatus of the Corpus Hermeticum, they showed how Blake draws on early modern traditions that understand human beings as children of the planets, while also participating in the artisanal visual culture of hermeticism. By contrast, William Blake and the Age of Aquarius showed a selection from all periods of Blake’s work to illustrate his influence on postwar American artists, from experiments in printmaking to Robert Smithson, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, the Vietnam protests, and rock culture. The reception of Blake in music and popular culture was key to his inclusion in the final room of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels, 1966–1970: Blake’s “Jerusalem” demonstrated how “dissent inspires protest across the centuries.” The information panel carefully tracked the legacy of the hymn as it was adopted by movements and parties across the political spectrum, from the suffragettes to Labour, Liberals, Liberal Democrats, and Conservatives. It also represented British identity in the 2012 London Olympics.

A Nation Wins its Spurs: Military Performances and National Identity in New Zealand’s Royal Visits, 1901-1927

Early royal visits to New Zealand were episodes of intense symbolic activity. These events are generally understood as affirmations of British identity. However, this article shows how the tours of 1901, 1920, and 1927 were also used to promote the country’s distinct character. It examines the visits’ military narrative, showing how rhetoric and performances cast Pākehā (New Zealanders of British descent) as a martial people who combined patriotism and vigour. Continuity with British fighting traditions was portrayed as a human timeline: a carefully organised sequence of veterans, recently returned soldiers, and new recruits. Uniquely colonial attributes were epitomised by unorthodox military heroes such as the Rough Rider and the Digger. In the aftermath of World War I, when the British world seemed to need replenishment, the dominion’s special character was symbolised by young New Zealanders. Conventional military reviews were superseded by massed displays by school children, as military performances for visiting royals began to favour images of rebirth and rejuvenation.

When it is Appropriate to Racially Appropriate: Reverse Colonial Miscegenation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

This presentation uses Victorian science to examine the racial conflict between Dracula and England in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The novel’s horror situates itself in the context of Late Victorian England and its contemporary fear of Reverse Colonization: the fear that England’s empire, already in its onset of decline, will be invaded and colonized by an uncivilized other people. The development of evolutionary theory stimulated concern that the opposite of evolution – degeneration – was not only possible, but already in effect. Stoker expresses England’s decline in accord with degeneration theory by portraying English men as weary. He establishes fear of Reverse Colonization by portraying Dracula to possess the animalistic vitality England lacks. Dracula invades and disrupts notions of English identity by mirroring the nation’s intelligence and consuming its women’s blood. Blood symbolizes racial identity, political allegiance, and, according to persisting medieval medical theory, semen. Thus, Dracula effectively consumes English racial identity, causes his victims to politically defect, and proliferates the vampire race through rape when sucking women’s blood. The lattermost invasion tactic is facilitated, according to contemporary studies of craniology, by women’s latent sexuality and criminality. Despite critics’ assertions that Dracula portrays miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races) as racial annihilation, the birth of Quincey Harker from mixed racial inputs at the novel’s end symbolizes the revitalization of the English race. The novel thus responds to contemporary degeneration theory by proposing miscegenation (with vital races and in which England remains the dominant racial input) as a solution to Late Victorian decline.

A “WHITE BOY . . . WHO IS NOT A WHITE BOY”: RUDYARD KIPLING'S KIM, WHITENESS, AND BRITISH IDENTITY

Rudyard Kipling's final novel, Kim (1901), begins with an intriguing – if paradoxical – description of the eponymous Kim, or Kimball O'Hara: he is an “English” boy with an Irish name and Irish parentage who speaks “the [Indian] vernacular by preference” (1). While the narrator hastens to reassure the reader that Kim is both “white” and “English,” Kim is also “burned black as any native” and speaks his supposed “mother tongue,” English, in an “uncertain sing-song” (1). If we are to take Kipling's assertion at face value, that Kim is, indeed, “English,” then certainly this is a kind of Englishness that is divorced completely from the racially pure ideals of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that were privileged by many racial theorists earlier in the nineteenth century. As an Irish Celt, Kipling's protagonist is always already at a layer of remove from ideals of pure Englishness, but Kipling renders Kim's racial identity even more complicated in the text. The manuscript of Kim gives us some telling clues about the contexts that inform Kipling's peculiar descriptions of “burned black” whiteness in his finished novel. While the published text baldly declares that “Kim was English. . . . Kim was white” (1; ch. 1; emphasis mine), parts of the manuscript are much less certain of this fact, as that document asserts that Kim “looked like a half caste” (Kipling, Kim o’ the ‘Rishti n. 3). And while Kipling ultimately removed this explicit link between Kim and Eurasian bodies in the opening of his published text, this disavowal is neither complete nor convincing throughout Kim. For instance, in the novel, the narrator later describes a “half-caste woman who looked after [Kim . . . and] told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister” (1; ch. 1). While this woman is not, in fact, the boy's aunt, Kim's near-familial tie with her underlines the intimate connection between him and the hybridized subjects of empire. Indeed, Kim demonstrates ideological and affective links to non-white Others and to people of mixed race, and this connection between whiteness and racial hybridity is of central importance to Kipling. If Kim is tenuously white, then he can only perform this whiteness in immediate proximity to racial hybridity, with which whiteness is ideologically contiguous in this text. As I contend in this paper, Kim reveals the under-examined links between early twentieth-century ideas of white British identity and descriptions of imperial miscegenation. In Kim, “White” and “English” emerge as a vexed pair of signifiers that reveal unprecedented traces of racial and national hybridization.

‘Britishersand Protestants’: Protestantism and Imperial British Identities in Britain, Canada and Australia from the 1880s to the 1920s

This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe's pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.