British Identity Research Articles

“The Band of Brothers”: The Mobilization of English Welsh Dual Identities in Second World War Britain

AbstractIn the run-up to the Second World War, the War Office agreed to organize territorial units that recruited specifically on the grounds of English Welsh dual identities. These formations, which comprised the 99th London Welsh Heavy Anti-Aircraft regiment and the 46th Liverpool Welsh Royal Tank Regiment, began recruiting in 1939 from English cities with significant Welsh populations. This article explores the mobilization and performance of English Welsh identities during the Second World War and reflects upon why, at a time of global conflict, some English men opted to enlist on the basis of Welsh antecedents. Relatively little attention has been paid to the plurality of British identity in wartime or to how the existence of what historian Thomas Hajkowski has called “hybrid ‘dual identities’” within the constituent countries of the United Kingdom informed the functioning of Britishness during the Second World War. Making use of previously unpublished and original life-writing sources, this article illuminates the significance of dual identifications across two nations at once—in this case, Wales and England—within the multinational state of Britain at war. Overall, by examining the intersectionality between subjective wartime constructions of kin, home, and nation(s), it points to how a sense of dual identifications could feed into recruitment patterns and potentially bolster combat motivation and morale. By highlighting the interconnectedness between constituent nations of Britain, and the complexities of identity formation within Britishness, this article adds to the literature that complicates the notion of fixed singular national identities and underscores the importance of dual identifications within and across the borders of the constituent nations in advancing our understanding of twentieth-century Britain.

Reading Lewis Cage: The Young Cricketer (1768), by Frances Cotes RA: Cricket, Art and the Rise of Nationalism in England after the Seven Years War

AbstractRecent scholarship has shown how the burst of cultural self‐confidence that followed the Seven Years War fuelled British desire for a national school of art and the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. This article re‐reads a portrait exhibited at the academy’s inaugural exhibition by leading London artist Francis Cotes. It argues that the portrait of young Lewis Cage was more than a simple portrait of a favourite son; rather, it was both an essay on the contours of contemporary British identity and a worked example of the potential of portraiture to rival the prestige of continental history painting.

‘Amazing Stories’: Australian newspapers and anti-spy panic, 1910–1945©

Moral panic has become a popular concept to explain a media frenzy that has provoked public alarm. A largely unexplored area of panic has been the exceptional allegations of pro-Nazi secret agents in Australia during World War II. Moral panics have often been viewed as the outcome of the media acting as a single entity to generate wild reporting and mass hysteria. This article proposes a refinement of the concept by showing that the press published varied reporting about a government crackdown on so-called fascist spies. The article focuses on the British accused spy and self-proclaimed journalist, Adela Pankhurst, and John Curtin, a hard-hitting labour reporter who became Australia’s wartime prime minister. Rival newspapers provided stylised expressions of civility and outrage about the sensational crackdown. The news of a battle against powerful traitors also shaped popular views of Curtin’s leadership and Australia’s need to uphold a democratic British identity.

Children of the Empire. The shaping of English identity, 1890-1914

Britain was an imperial power in the quarter-century before the outbreak of World War. Leaders expressed a sense of moral responsibility for ensuring competent and just rule for the nations of the Empire. At the same time, the fulfillment of this duty was a justification for the exercise of power itself, understood in ethical terms, and involved the preparation of a citizen of the Empire, both educated and shaped by universally accessible school education. The teaching of history, linked to the formation of the identity of the model citizen, has been subordinated to this preparation. The current article is an attempt at indicating the presence and purpose of historical threads in materials intended for the initial learning of reading.

Brexit and the European National Health Service England Workforce: A Quantitative Analysis of Doctors' Perceived Professional Impact and Intentions to Leave the United Kingdom.

Background:Although survey data suggest that Brexit has negatively influenced European doctors’ decisions to remain in the United Kingdom, this is the first quantitative study to use multivariate analysis to explore this relationship.Objective:To assess how Brexit relates to doctors’ migration intentions in relation to their feelings that Brexit has impacted their professional life, national identity, and demographic factors.Method:We collected data from 59 self-reported EU/EEA/European identifying doctors working in the UK. We weighted results to the English National Health Service population in terms of gender, professional grade level and ethnicity and ran weighted regression analyses of respondents’ plans (leaving, considering, not considering) and whether they reported Brexit influencing their decision-making. We then examined how stating that Brexit affected their career, national identity, and sex and age related to doctors’ intentions to leave or stay.Findings:The more doctors agreed that Brexit had impacted their professional lives, the more likely they were to state they intended to leave the UK. We found doctors with increased levels of British identity less likely to leave than those with reduced British identity. Interestingly, we found that those with higher levels of European identity were less likely to leave but more sharply likely to consider leaving compared to those with lower levels of European identity.Conclusions:Respondents reported large professional impacts of Brexit. To retain these individuals in the British medical system, the NHS should provide financial and legal assistance for those applying for settled status and financial and other incentives comparable to what doctors could receive in EU health systems.

Brexit and the Occult

Since the EU referendum Leavers and Remainers have increasingly used occult metaphors to attack each other, as they decry the UK’s drift into ‘uncharted waters’ or descent into ‘tribalism’. How might gender and race shape this current crisis of British identity? In 2017 Rita Duffy created Soften the Border, an installation of hand-knitted votive dolls on the Northern Irish-Irish border. In 2018 Project O exhibited Saved at London’s Somerset House, a video depicting women of colour performing magical rituals in a post-apocalyptic watery wasteland. What might these artworks tell us about the ways in which magic has long been weaponised by patriarchal white supremacy, as well as the ways in which the supernatural has also been used as a form of political resistance? Soften the Border and Saved offer an image of a UK no longer ruling the waves, unable to ‘take back control’ and haunted by ghosts of empire.

Contesting Brexit Masculinities: Pro‐European Activists and Feminist EU Citizenship*

AbstractAlthough Brexit campaigns mobilized discourses of hegemonic masculinity that marginalize women, women seemed to be at the forefront of pro‐EU campaigns post‐referendum. I explore to what extent pro‐EU activists make claims to EU citizenship that contest the masculinities of Brexit. Combining Isin's approach to citizenship as ‘performed subject positions’ with intersectional feminist theory, I argue that masculinity became a site of EU citizenship contestation, which nevertheless reproduced racialized and class‐based exclusions. Drawing on interviews with grassroots pro‐EU activists, I argue that activists reject militaristic discourses of British identity by asserting multiple embodied identities, demand rights relating to the intimate sphere, and participate in informal, local and non‐hierarchical ways. Yet, they reveal a white cultural European identity, a European exceptionalism in demands for rights, and a failure to break with the whiteness of traditional social movements. These findings demonstrate the need for feminist and intersectional analysis within EU public opinion research.

Revisiting Jomo Kenyatta’s Nation Branding through the Construction of National Identity in Kenya.

This study analysed nation branding through the mobilisation of elements of Kenya’s national identity under Jomo Kenyatta’s regime. Nation branding and national identity perspectives are used to deepen the understanding of how Kenya constructed and branded its identity. It advances the notion that, as Kenya transitioned from colonialism to independence, a new nation was reimagined and redefined by mobilising elements of national identity and according them new meanings. The study is founded on the notion that the concept of nation branding is not new, nor is the practice since nations have historically reinvented themselves due to the changing circumstances. For Kenya, nation branding can be traced to the period following independence through the construction of the country’s national identity. This process was marked with the mobilisation of Kenya’s cultural elements aimed at replacing customs and traditions of the British constructed during the colonial period. Kenya’s nationalist leaders were motivated by the idea that colonialism had led to the emergence of a new breed of Africans shaped by and practising British cultures; a new form of culture that was neither African nor British or a new hybrid; and a group of Africans who were firmly attached to their African traditions. The need by Jomo Kenyatta, therefore, to change the colonial image to one that resonated with independent Kenya, as well as to assert his rule called for the replacement of the sonic and visual elements of British identity with those resonating with the new nation.

Hong Kong English and linguistic identity of Hong Kongers

ABSTRACT This article examines the attitudes toward Hong Kong English (HKE) and its role in carrying the linguistic identity of Hong Kongers under the influence of the Hong Kong protests against the proposed legislation of the 2019 extradition bill. Two groups of Hong Kongers with and without overseas living experiences were chosen in this study. A questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews were used to compare their acceptability on HKE and views on language use. This study sheds light on the evolution of HKE by examining its interpretation based on the personal experiences of the participants influenced by different sociological factors. The results show that even though the majority of the two groups disagree that they speak or use HKE more often during this period, they tend to support HKE as a marker of identity with a distinct pattern shown between the young and middle to older generations.

Exploring the interrelationship between culture and learning: the case of English as a second language in India

ABSTRACT Despite the continuous efforts of educationists and policy-makers to customise the existing culture of learning according to universal standards, the verity of Indian classrooms at the primary level has been less convincing, particularly in second-language learning and teaching. The central objective of this article is to analyse and correlate the superficially scattered factors which play a significant role in determining the culture of learning for English as a second language in India. The article examines the status of English among Indian languages and the pertinent reasons which make English the most sought-after medium of instruction in the entire nation. Another factor evaluated is the changing identity of English in India. Further, this article examines the impact of status and identity of English on the English language teachers and the pedagogical activities happening inside classrooms.

Must Labour Lose?

This article explores Mark Abrams, Richard Rose, and Rita Hinden’s 1960 publication Must Labour Lose? in order to demonstrate that contemporary debates around British identity and political culture are nothing new. The concerns about political, party, and national identity in this book clearly prefigure 2016 debates about Britain, not least because a specific question—how to vote—became a conversation about a broader set of ideals. This article explores how Must Labour Lose? constructed an image of British politics in 1959. It interrogates its silences around racial identity and argues that we must read race into this book and others like it. And it concludes that research like this enables a much wider understanding of the British electorate than simply how they voted.

“The Chalk Wall Falls to the Foam”: Reimagining Littoral Space in the Poetry of the Dover Cliffs

Abstract Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia

Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural exceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about British identity politics today. Set in an inward-looking, socially homogeneous, and postindustrial society somewhere in the colonial southern hemisphere, Erewhon provides an anachronistic simulacrum of both an isolationist “Little England” and an imperial “Global Britain,” critiquing the idea of the self-sufficient, ethnonationalist “island nation” by demonstrating the extent to which it relies on the racial logic of White utopianism, as well as on a disavowal of the non-British labor that supports and sustains it.

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월터 스콧의 『롭 로이』가 그리는 역사적 대전환

This paper tries to take a closer look at the great historical transfor-mation from pre-capitalist traditional society to modern commercial one in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. The novel faithfully describes the plight of Scottish Highlanders under the ruthless logic of capitalist commerce. Scott devotes himself to giving a realistic picture of desperate struggles of Highlanders that Rob Roy and his band represent, but tries little to gloss over the historically inevitable downfall of the Highland clan societies. We can hardly find literary works more vivid and sympathetic than Rob Roy in depicting contemporary Scottish commoners, except those of radical Romantic poets. At the same time, Scott succeeds in forging unheard-of Scottish identity that will address the advent of modernity and also contribute to the British identity to integrate the whole Great Britain since the Union of 1707, a new identity that the love and marriage of Diana Vernon and Frank Osbaldistone symbolizes. This new national identity is far from illusory or deceptive as critics of nationalism often say, though it is obviously an “invented” one.

USING NARRATIVE INQUIRY TO EXAMINE TEACHERS' IDENTITY VIA FACEBOOK NARRATIVES

Identity is the result of one's personality, upbringing, learning and working experience. This article presents the results of a research on the personal identity of a lecturer teaching English at a university in Vietnam. The article analyzes the teacher's shared narratives on Facebook about his life and teaching experiences. In-depth interviews were conducted over a one-year period following narrative inquiry procedure. The paper shows the complexity of the participant's four intertwined identities as well as the potential of Facebook as an online platform to share and reflect on personal experiences, thereby allowing readers to engage in a dual process of identification and negotiation of meanings ​​in identity formation. Social networks have the potential to mitigate the isolation of teachers in their pursuit of professional development activities and to promote the formation and development of professional communities.

A Question of Contrast: Unpacking the Mail Online’s Depiction of Meghan Markle’s Royal Motherhood

Working from a cultural studies perspective, this article explores how contrast, as a rhetorical device, is used by the Mail Online, a British tabloid, to cast Meghan Markle as “threatening” the monarchy and, by extension, traditional notions of British identity. One of the principal ways this conflict is constructed is through repeated comparisons between Markle and her sister-in-law Kate Middleton. Contrasted with Middleton, the Mail Online positions Markle as dominating, nontraditional, and pushy. Concurrently, contrasted with “unorthodox” Markle, the once-maligned Middleton is reinvented and venerated as a reassuringly “normal” royal. This article unpacks these dynamics, arguing that the Mail Online’s coverage of Markle is an example of how long-standing racialized, classed, and sexist stereotypes are being reconfigured in the digital era, reflecting a wider instability around cultural notions of Britishness in a post-Brexit world.

Labour and the Patriot Game

AbstractThe Labour Party has recently been advised to showcase its patriotism and let the electorate know it is proud to be British. This is never bad advice for a mainstream political party with designs on power and certainly Labour in the past has enjoyed electoral success when its redistributionist policies have sprung, at least in part, from an obvious love of country. There's a certain urgency, too, in the suggestion, since the Corbyn leadership convinced many former Labour voters that the party was careless about a British identity and perhaps even hostile to British interests. Nevertheless, it would be foolish for Keir Starmer's Labour Party to enter into a destructive competition with the Tories to see who looks better with the national flag. For reasons which the article explores, there are strict limits beyond which a social democratic party would not care to go in such a contest. But this ought not matter. Voters do not want to see Labour leaders telling them how patriotic they are. They are content to be shown. This article surveys the history and looks at some possibilities inherent in Labour and the patriot game.

Mutual Relationship of foreign language learning and cultural Identity: A Critical Overview

The present qualitative study explores the relationship between English language learning and identity reform from the view of Iranian language learners. The data are collected by interviews with twenty male advanced learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The researcher believes that learning English have a profound impact on how they perceive their identity. Motivation and English as an international language have vital role in viewing and reconstructing identity. These days identity change is more common as people are experiencing globalization. That is why sociocultural matters have vital role in recognize shift and reconstruction.

EFL PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF AN IDEAL ENGLISH TEACHER

Standards of being a professional teacher in Indonesia have been set by the government in the Teachers Law Number 14, 2005. One of the requirements is having four teacher competences; pedagogical, personality, social and professional competences. Yet, the empirical data show that Indonesian education quality and teacher competence are still below the standards, including English teacher. This concern leads curiosity about pre-service teachers’ awareness of this situation. Therefore, this study was aimed to discover EFL pre-service teachers’ perception on the criteria of an ideal English teacher within the framework of the four teachers’ standard competences, the most important competence and their consideration in choosing it. By using explanatory sequential mixed method, 100 EFL pre-service teachers were involved. The data were gathered through a questionnaire, then followed up by an interview to some participants. As the result, a divergence finding was found. Personality competence obtained the highest mean score on the criteria of an ideal English teacher while pedagogical competence was opted as the most important competence. Further, an interview was done to reveal considerations contributing to the divergence finding. The interviewees agreed with the criteria constructing the personality competence as teachers are role model who must set good example for their students. However, teaching is teachers’ main task where they need to deliver their knowledge to students in order to achieve the learning goals through pedagogical competence. This study concludes that not only pedagogical competence that mater in teaching, but teachers’ personality is also crucial.