British Identity Research Articles

Формирование протонациональной английской политической идентичности VIII-XIII вв. (Formation of a Pro-National English Political Identity of the VIII-XIII Centuries)

Russian abstract: Основная задача - проанализировать механизмы становления и особенности английской идентичности, сформировавшейся в Средние века. Ее суть состояла в наложении германских племенных идентичностей на географический концепт «Британия», сложившийся еще в эпоху Античности. После ухода с острова в начале V века римских войск и т. н. «англосаксонского завоевания» часть бриттской интеллектуальной элиты сохранила представление о Британии как о политическом целом. В этот же период Беда Достопочтенном идея о Британии как о едином географическом понятии, и, в то же время, о полиэтничном и политически раздробленном острове. Нет убедительных свидетельств, что кто-либо из англосаксонских правителей вплоть до 2-й четверти Х века заявлял претензии на власть над всем островом. English abstract: The goal of the work was to analyze the ways of the forging of English identity in the Middle Ages. Its components were the tribal identities of German-speaking (‘AngloSaxon’) population and geographical concept of ‘Britain’ (Latin ‘Britannia’) that had emerged in the Classical age. After the departure of the Roman troops and collapse of imperial administration the early fifth century at least part of the Brittonic elite kept the idea of the island as a political entity.

‘We are, by nature, a tolerant people’: Securitisation and counter-securitisation in UK migration politics

The ‘securitisation’ of migration is argued to rest on a process of framing migrants as a threat to key values, principally identity. Yet, the socially constructed nature of ‘identity’ implies the potential for dual usage: support and contestation of the security frame. Using the UK as an illustrative case, this overlooked dynamic is explored through mixed-methods, incorporating elite political and religious discourse (2005–2015) and original public attitudinal survey evidence. The discourse analysis reveals that the preservation of an imperilled British identity (‘tolerance’) is a frame invoked, in different ways and by different actors, to either support or contest the securitisation of migration. Similarly, British citizens who deeply value the preservation of ‘Britishness’ have diverse, positive and negative views on migration, challenging the notion that identity as a referent object is deterministically linked to anti-immigration attitudes. The innovative concept of ‘counter-securitisation’ is utilised and developed, unpicking these nuances and their implications.

Does the UK ‘citizenship process’ lead immigrants to reject British identity? A panel data analysis

In societies where solidarity and cohesion are experienced primarily via shared national identity, immigration raises questions regarding how non-nationals can gain social membership, so that they are not perceived as undermining solidarity and cohesion. A key aspect of immigrants’ experiences is thus whether they embrace the national identity of the destination country. Governments in many destination countries increasingly seek to ensure that they do, via policy initiatives that impose specific requirements for gaining legal citizenship: applicants for naturalization are commonly required to pass a test (ensuring sufficient knowledge of e.g. ‘life in the UK’) and attend a ceremony that includes a pledge of loyalty. This paper considers whether the British version of these requirements is effective in leading immigrants to embrace British national identity. It uses data drawn from the UK household panel survey (‘Understanding Society’) to facilitate a comparison between those immigrants who become citizens and those who do not. The main finding is that those who become citizens significantly increase their attachment to British identity. Whether they do so specifically because of the policy requirements (the test and ceremony) is debatable, but it seems clear that these requirements do not inhibit development of a sense of Britishness among the immigrants who meet them.

From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is an adaptation of the Greek play Antigone contextualized in a post 9–11 Britain. Seen through the prism of a transnational framework, this novel is a narrative of British Muslims and their negotiations of their British Muslim identity. The intersecting trajectories of two families forms the narrative impetus and scaffolds the social, political and economic discourses within which the text is to be read. If Shamsie’s scene of race-religion interpellation is one way in which the narrative of Home Fire is framed, the cross cutting of British policies and legislation based on state anxieties is the other. In this paper, I offer parallel readings of the text and the discourses of the state that show radicalization’s emergence as a primary risk in the consciousness of the Global North; as a result, not only are the rights of citizenship curtailed, a certain cultural identity is produced that offers limited subject positions to the British Muslims. Intertextual readings of Home Fire and policy making in Britain reveals the limitations and sinister intentions of the state discourses around policing of communities and production of identities.

‘Flannelled Fools are Strutting About Tennis Courts’: Lawn Tennis in Britain During the Great War

This article examines the connections between (lawn) tennis in Britain and the Great War (1914–1918). While previous historical research has suggested a four-year hiatus, in fact the sport continued to be played during the war, recreationally and among servicemen/women and more elite players in exhibition matches. Anecdotes about the cessation of tournaments and restricted play were interspersed with debates about the appropriateness of continuing play recreationally, as the ‘gentleman in tennis flannels’ became a symbol of public censure. Alongside enlistment, tennis players responded to the call byoffering their club facilities to the war effort, digging up courts to plant vegetables, hosting charity matches, and providing entertainment for convalescent soldiers. This analysis highlights the significance of tennis as a vehicle to promote a kind of British identity, as responses to the war as seen through tennis reflected broader sporting ideals, privileging amateurism, fair play and the ‘stuff upper lip’.

Essentialism affects the perceived compatibility of minority culture maintenance and majority culture adoption preferences.

This paper presents two cross-sectional survey studies, both conducted in Britain, which focus on how different cultural identities are managed in multicultural settings. Specifically, the studies explored the extent to which essentialism moderates the perceived compatibility of acculturation orientations, heritage culture maintenance and majority culture adoption. In study 1, participants (N=198) were Somali minority members living in the UK. It was found when minority members essentialized Britishness themselves, and when they perceived that British people essentialized Britishness, they saw a desire to maintain the culture of origin and a desire adopt the majority culture as conflicting with each other. In study 2, participants (N=200) were white British majority members living in the UK. Findings showed that when white British majority members essentialized Britishness, they too perceived the two acculturation preferences as being incompatible with each other. Taken together, these studies show that essentializing British identity can lead to a view that the majority and minority cultures are mutually exclusive. Implications for intergroup relations and integration into British society are discussed.

Ain’t no black in the (Brexit) Union Jack? Race and empire in the era of Brexit and the Windrush scandal

ABSTRACT This article examines Brexit and the Windrush scandal as twin manifestations of the border anxieties that have structured questions of belonging in contemporary Britain. It discusses Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack as two texts which attend to questions of race and empire in the mid-20th century in relation to British national identity. Both Clarke and Gilroy situate the reterritorialization of Britain in the wake of the globalizing history of British Empire which made possible, for instance, the widescale solidarities and conscriptions of World War II. In their attention to the role of empire in the making of Britain, these texts effectively complicate easy demarcations of Britishness and borders and allow us to historicize the conditions under which national boundaries have come to be so central to narratives of British identity.

The Brexit within: Mapping the rural and the urban in contemporary British fiction

ABSTRACT Just as the 2016 referendum results had spiralled into a full-blown crisis, it became increasingly clear that Britain’s push to leave the European Union (EU) concealed another crisis: a “Brexit within”. This term refers to the entries, exits, and enclosures that course through a dominant narrative of English national identity: countryside versus city life. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), this article argues that the rural and the urban serve as a template to diagnose other forms of division in Britain – racial, social, cultural, and economic – that the Brexit vote brought to the fore. The reading is based on two works of fiction published in the immediate aftermath of the referendum: Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017). Both narratives continue a larger literary tradition of Condition-of-England novels, as they map out new sites of marginalization and precarity in the post-imperial nation.

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? The Uses of History in Scottish Nationalist Politics, 2007‐Present

The Scottish National Party (SNP) was elected into government in 2007, and in January 2012 announced plans for an independence referendum. In the same period, the SNP government implemented substantial cultural and heritage projects — some of which showcased the long history of Scottish‐English animosity. In the accompanying political rhetoric, it was clear that the SNP was utilising history for the 2014 independence campaign. This referendum ultimately resulted in Scotland's retention of the Union, though the SNP remained in power. The Scottish‐British relationship was further tested in 2016, however, with the UK referendum on leaving the EU. All Scottish electorates voted in favour of remaining, and the chasm between Scottish and British identities and future trajectories has since widened further. This article compares the SNP's promotion of nationalist historical narratives prior to the 2014 referendum, particularly those seen in government‐supported heritage initiatives, with subsequent historical narratives expressed especially through diplomatic engagements in light of Brexit. In doing so, the infusion of nationalist histories in contemporary Scottish politics — and the potential complications of this approach for the SNP in the post‐Brexit political landscape — will be highlighted.

Non-normative corporalities and transgender identity in English as a Foreign Language student teachers

Little international research exists on EFL (English as a Foreign Language) student teachers regarding transgender identity and non-normative corporalities. Similarly, few studies in Colombia have investigated the concept of teacher identity of transgender EFL student teachers to understand this dimension of identity. This study explores the transgender/blind identity of an EFL student teacher. The study took on identity as multiple and fluid to understand how transgender identity serves a lens to shape the process of becoming a teacher. Findings suggest that transgender identity is made from either experiences that modify or re-construct the self. The study revealed that the notion of gender is contested when the idea of transgender works as a personal mechanism to question the existing normativity of one’s own body and the self. Identity is then presented as a series of choices and performances situated in time that are validated in the transgender and blind condition.

Edward Thomas and Hedges: England’s going out of Stile

Abstract Edward Thomas’s life and writing are marked by his attentiveness to rural England. With an overview of Thomas’ prose writings and then a set of close readings of his poetry, this essay describes how he presented hedges as an especially important part of the English countryside. Examining Thomas’s prose, the essay sets out how he saw hedges bringing natural life together into concentrated versions of landscapes, and how he argued that these concentrations could represent the English national identity. As the essay demonstrates, these ideas came into his poetry. His speakers see English field life as intricately interwoven. Some respond to the ongoing First World War by building on this intricacy. Their sense of being at home in England and belonging there is fuelled by treating hedges as portals to an eternal and a pre-industrial England. By considering the roles that hedges have in his poems, this essay shows how Thomas shaped them into a focal point for portraying speakers who have a connection to the national identity.

Whose space is it anyway? Whose space is it anyway? The architecture of social exclusion and why it is bad for the public’s health.

Over the past decade there has been a significant upsurge in nationalist politics and sentiment in both Europe and the USA. Ideas of nationhood and sovereignty have become dominant themes within political discourse, and there has been a rise in the popularity of right wing parties that espouse strict immigration control. In the UK, the concept of ‘health tourism’ has become an issue in relation to the underfunded National Health Service (NHS). Similarly, benefit fraud (another much publicised form of ‘tourism’), often represented in the media as organised by eastern European gangs, has been used as a reason to challenge the free movement of people within the EU.
 The 2016 presidential election in the USA, and the UK referendum on EU membership, in the same year, both focused on taking direct action against inward migration, which was characterised as having an adverse effect on the economies, infrastructures and social values of both countries. While Mexicans and Muslims were targeted in the USA, in the UK blame was directed at the free movement of EU citizens, especially those from eastern European countries such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states. Autochthonous populations (predominantly white and Christian) have become increasingly vocal in their rhetoric of fear: migrants taking your jobs, Muslims threatening your culture and security, political correctness restricting your liberty to speak your mind and, in the UK, the “deliberate attempt to water down the British identity” (UKIP, 2010) have all contributed to the creation of a hostile environment towards ‘others’ and ‘otherness’. This paper will look at the role of populist politics and contemporary architecture in assisting the demonization of the homeless, and will use the endemic levels of tuberculosis in the UK’s capital city, London, to exemplify the consequences for public health and the health of the public.

How do the English Project Themselves? Notes on the Selfhood and Identity Referring to the English, as Seen From the Perspective of Humour Studies

English humour is religiously involved in the creation of the English identity drawing on the nation’s memory, history as well as culture. A great deal of it is devoted to the preservation of a certain self-portrait on the part of the English in that their identity is glorified, demonstrated in a positive light, with the English invariably playing a noble role against the backdrop of historical events, frequently standing alone in the presence of traumatic and unpredictable changes. This article aims to examine English comedy from a cognitive linguistic perspective to demonstrate how the English identity is formulated and (re)shaped, and how the concept of the English self is proudly created in relation to the national identity via the cultural memories and English humour.

Neoliberalism, British Identity, and Brexit

This paper, taking Linda Colley's work on the formation of British identity in the eighteenth century as a starting point, argues that the essentials as she delineated them (of Britain as at once island nation, imperial metropole, trading and naval power, and Protestant society, and in all these antithetical to continental Europe), while considerably and sometimes awkwardly adapted, have endured down to the present. In considering this the focus is on how the neo-liberal (and neoconservative) turn of British politics in the Thatcher era and after reinforced a version of this conception of British identity, and its distinctness from Europe, with implications for economic and social attitudes, and plausibly factoring into the support for British exit from the European Union seen in the historic 2016 referendum.

National identities in the context of Shakespeare’sHenry V: Exploring contemporary understandings through collocations

Shakespeare’s clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare’s characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this study, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560–1639 and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V’s appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use – when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present day and early modern, on ‘nationhood’ in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.

To leave or not to leave? Understanding the support for the United Kingdom membership in the European Union: Identity, attitudes towards the political system and socio-economic status

This article proposes a decision model of the British support for leaving the European Union (EU) that includes both identity aspirations, attitudes towards the political system and economic interest and test it on the Understanding Society 6th, 7th and 8th surveys. Current studies tend to interpret the British Euroscepticism as a combination of attachment to British identity, lack of economic opportunities and dissatisfaction with the political class. Using this approach where factors are additive, it is not possible to account for the substantial portion of socio-economically advantaged individuals which prefer to leave the EU, and for those who, despite their low attachment to their British identity, the relatively high educational level and satisfaction with domestic democracy, prefer to leave the EU. I use a theoretical approach which considers both economic and cultural considerations as rational considerations and conceptualise their interaction in terms of trade off. I use classification tree analysis to evaluate the relative importance of the main explanatory factors and of their interaction. The results show that the negative evaluation of the political system makes certain groups, which otherwise tend to support European integration, lean towards Euroscepticism. It helps to explain the Euroscepticism of those who are less attached to their British identity and of advantaged classes. The results have also showed that anti-establishment attitudes are not associated with disadvantaged socio-economic groups. The dissatisfaction with domestic democracy is relevant mostly for the advantaged classes, and the lack of political efficacy affects equally the attitudes of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Last, disadvantaged groups’ support for European integration is driven by identity aspirations not by economic interest.

The Complex Construction of Female English Teachers’ Identity in Iran

There has been a growing interest regarding the identity formation in the broader TESOL research field; however there is scares number of studies which examined the formation of the female teacher’s identity using a feminist poststructuralist framework. This study also attempts to help to grow the existing literature regarding the female teacher’s identity formation by seeking to explore the construction of an Iranian female English teacher identity and the related discourses that shape and reshape her identity through delving into the narratives, using data collected from interviews. To investigate the participant’s main subject positions and the prevailing discursive practices that construct them, feminist poststructuralist conceptual framework was applied in this study. The research data, gathered from interviews indicates the teacher’s identity as multiple, complex, and contradictory construct. The findings reveal both gender and professional discourses impact the way which this woman tries to conceive a sense of coherent self. The normative, disciplinary, and individualizing nature of the gender and professional discourses was also revealed as the result of the analysis.

Expresso Bongo and Make Me an Offer: The ‘Angry Young Musical’ in the 1950s

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play Look Back in Anger of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. Expresso Bongo and Lily White Boys, works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.

British Philanthropists and the Imperial Imagination orThe Case of the Canadians Distressed by Fire at Montreal

This article reconstructs the benevolent campaign mounted in London after the devastating Montreal fire of 1765. Appealing to a greater sense of British identity, the trustees framed the French Canadian sufferers as “new subjects” entitled to both imperial benevolence and Christian charity. At the core of the subscription were notable London philanthropist Jonas Hanway and Marine Society peers John Thompson and Fowler Walker. Well versed in the mechanics of a successful charitable subscription, the trustees employed a familiar Georgian strategy using a robust print and coffeehouse campaign to solicit public support. However, the trustees overestimated the public’s acceptance of their construction of a “greater Britain” and underestimated the elevated political enmity towards the British American colonies in the era following the Seven Years’ War. A lack of donor interest compelled them to enlarge their efforts and shift away from newer charitable tactics, instead embracing more traditional avenues such as gaining the patronage of King George III and engaging the greater British public through parish fundraising. This case study highlights the complexities of transatlantic benevolence and its use to push the boundaries of British identity in the mid-eighteenth century.

To ‘fan the spirit of race hatred’: lawn tennis, propaganda and Germanophobia during the Great War

ABSTRACT This study considers the various ways that tennis was implicated within First World War propaganda; more specifically, to consider tennis as both a lens to view and a context to understand and communicate perspectives about the war from a British perspective. In the midst of heightened nationalism, jingoism and Germanophobia, tennis featured in broader debates in both the mainstream and sporting press as a site of contested meanings of British national identity. This was seen through poetry and cartoons alongside public correspondence through letters to editors and various published discussions. These messages typically defended Britain’s amateur games culture, utilising constructions of ‘sportsmanship’ to distinguish British and German approaches, while denigrating Germany’s more functionalistic understanding of sport’s role in training. These messages were far from one-sided, as some British correspondents sought to defend German tennis players as somehow ‘above’ their barbarous brethren in ethics. Moreover, through tennis, Germans also communicated their objections to Britain’s apparently more ‘frivolous’ attitude toward sport and warfare. Thus, narratives were diverse and conflicting, and were indicative of ongoing confusions expressed publicly about the supposed role of amateur sport as a site of political expression.