Protecting Whiteness: Counter-Terrorism, and British Identity in the BBC’s Bodyguard

This article uses Bodyguard to trace the ways that whiteness is represented in counter-terrorism TV and so draw the links between whiteness, counter-terrorism and culture. It argues that Bodyguard offers a redemptive narrative for British whiteness that recuperates and rearticulates a British white identity after/through the War on Terror. As such it belongs to a later genre of counter-terrorism TV shows that move on from, but nonetheless still propagate, the discursive foundations of the ongoing War on Terror. This reading of Bodyguard is itself important, as popular culture is a site where much of the British population made and continues to make sense of their relationship to the UK during the War on Terror, forging often unspoken ideas about whiteness. It affords the opportunity to draw out the connections between whiteness and counter-terrorism, connections that need further scholarly attention to fully understand the complex relationships between security and race.

Double Consciousness in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

This article throws light on the issue of identity and Double Consciousness which creates traumatic effects on the psyche, identity and culture of Shahid, the representative of South Asian Immigrants depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album in Britain. In The Black Album, Shahid is depicted as a South Asian British Muslim who looks at himself from the eyes of the White British and he finds two-ness in himself, which is similar to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of Double Consciousness that “is the sense of always looking at one’s self from the eyes of others” (2). So, the article reveals the double consciousness of Shahid, the protagonist who carries hybrid identity for having British White mother and Pakistani Muslim father. Because of being a South Asian Muslim immigrant living under the hegemony of White Supremacy in Britain, he experiences Double Consciousness, which causes his inferiority complex, lack of self-esteem, rootlessness, in-betweenness and fragmentation of identity. Thus, the article deals with the Double Consciousness within the binary opposition between the East and West, Islamic Fundamentalist and Western Liberalism, and Pakistani Identity and British Identity. According to the theorists Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, the colonized people who become immigrants in the postcolonial era suffer from identity crisis and double consciousness as they face segregation, racism, discrimination and various other forms of Othering.

Faith, Identity and Magical Realism in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons

This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in the contemporary Anglophone Arab narrative of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019). The study follows a methodology which combines two critical approaches to magical realism: first, a textual approach, and then a contextual one. Accordingly, the study uses key magical realist elements in Bird Summons to delineate the poetics of magical realism within the narrative, before determining the context in which magical realism functions in the narrative. Simultaneously, the study benefits from Christopher Warnes’s two strands of magical realism, ‘faith-based magical realism’ and ‘irreverent magical realism’ in providing a coherent basis for the use of magical realism in the text. This study aims at examining the significance of the magical realist narrative in articulating Arab British identity in Bird Summons. The analysis will interpret the role of magical realism in conveying and undermining the dominant ethnic and racial discourses which shape Arab British identities in Britain. The study’s findings demonstrate how the use of magical realism in the examined Anglophone Arab novel reinforces the fictional purposes of Aboulela as a hyphenated Arab, as it allows her to undermine dominant discourses on hyphenated Arab identities. At the same time, the use of magical realism allows Aboulela to (re)construct Arab British identities within her novel, apart from essentialist views of identity.

Vegetarian Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Victorian vegetarians envisioned the evolutionary progress of the human race from a cannibal past towards a vegetarian future, moralizing evolutionary science to vindicate their cause. This essay explores this rhetoric of vegetarian evolution and how it conjoined vegetarian identity with British identity by reinventing vegetarianism as a practice of individual liberty. The main archives I examine are the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (1860–1887), a major vegetarian journal from the period, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a work of speculative fiction that represents vegetarian utopianism from an evolutionary angle. My reading of the Dietetic Reformer reveals that Victorian vegetarians imagined themselves to be at the vanguard of human evolution, with their conscious, mindful, and individual practices of vegetarianism operating as a progressive departure from what they perceived as the communal and anti-modern vegetarianism of the non-Western world. By doing so, they reshaped human evolution not only into a teleological progress, but also into a humanized process, on which individual subjects had a direct bearing through their control over daily food consumption. The rhetoric of vegetarian evolution thus addressed a deeper cultural anxiety about individual agency in the Victorian period, provoked by the Darwinian turn. This vegetarian resolution, however, as my reading of The Coming Race uncovers, contained incongruities within its rhetoric. Bulwer-Lytton’s literary representation of an evolved vegetarian species as a homogeneous heap rather than a society of self-governing individuals discloses the inherent difficulty in reconciling individual moral agency with the framework of evolutionary vegetarianism.

Underdogs and Englishmen—Diana and the Secular Worship of the Nation

In “The Archive” we republish articles that, in hindsight, may have been ahead of their time in its prescience. Our pull for this issue is a 1997 piece from Stephen Heathorn originally written in the wake of the death of Princess Diana. Drawing on the outpouring of emotion displayed worldwide following Diana’s death, Heathorn discusses the role royal mythmaking plays in the maintenance of British nationalism and policing of British identity during a time of declining British imperialism. Through an engaging and exciting piece of scholarship that discusses one of the world’s most beloved public figures, Heathorn encourages a critical, sociopolitical interrogation of the myths we may not even realize we subscribe to.

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

In 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.

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.

MASCULINITY AND IDENTITY IN ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith portrays the lives of three immigrant families in Britain in the late half of twentieth century. Besides the generally celebrated theme of multiculturalism, this article argues that the novel is an exploration of the relationship between the identity of the second-generation immigrants and their fathers’ masculinity. The lack of masculinity in the fathers among the first-generation immigrants makes the second-generation immigrants cannot construct their British identity, they have to turn to other fatherly fingers for financial and social capital. Through the portrait of masculinity, the author expresses her concern of the racial discrimination against the immigrants and the importance of first-generation immigrants’ masculinity. But on the other hand, the novel’s portrait of men without masculinity intensified the stereotyped negative image of immigrants.

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

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.