Disrupted Parenthood in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage

In his debut novel The Final Passage, first published in 1985, Caryl Phillips (dis)connects the English and the Caribbean spaces simultaneously imposing this inbetweenness onto his continuously misplaced characters. This paper explores the novel through the lens of disrupted parenthood, demonstrating that the ties between the family members mirror the inability of the protagonists to belong or to sustain relationships. By applying a postcolonial framework and including both canonical and recent texts produced in the field, this paper analyses how racial labels and assumptions weaken fragile bonds and further displace the characters as it also attempts to fill a gap since aspects of distress and breakdown are often neglected in literary criticism. Finally, given the background of the West Indies, the paper incorporates social and anthropological works dedicated to the region and connects Phillips’s narrative to the stories of migrants in contemporary Britain.

Postimperial Melancholia and Brexit

The lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union have been characterized by particular psychic reactions and affective states: shock, perplexity, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, anger, depression, delusion, and manic elation. The debate over Brexit has played out largely in an affective register. Scholars and journalists in search of explanations have reached for psychological concepts such as amnesia and have cited feelings, specifically nostalgia and anger, as major factors. Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia provides a more useful analytical framework for constructing histories of Brexit beyond the usual narratives of reversal, unexpected rupture, or liberation, and for unearthing the psychic attachments and affective dynamics underlying such narratives. Gilroy’s conception of postimperial melancholia allows us to see the links between Brexit, anti-immigrant racism, and the obsession with national identity, and the unacknowledged and ongoing legacies of empire and decolonization in contemporary Britain.

The terrifying abyss of insignificance: Marginalisation, mattering and violence between young people

The concept of mattering can be helpful for understanding the ways in which structural and historical factors affect individual psychologies. This paper lays out the usefulness of mattering as a lens through which to examine why a small minority of young people in Britain commit violent acts. We first explore what it means to matter and the evidence linking the quest to matter with violence, and then examine the factors in contemporary Britain which can diminish a young person’s sense of mattering, using recent community research. We then critique the British government’s attempt to address the problem of violence through Gang Injunctions and Knife Crime Prevention Orders. We conclude by suggesting that policy-makers could gain substantial insight from investigating the connections between marginalisation, mattering and violence, rather than focusing disproportionately on the music young people choose to listen to or create, or the specific weapon that they opt to carry.

Rethinking Education: A Case for Tarbiyah in Contemporary Britain

This paper explores solutions to the limitations of the purpose of education as currently understood and advocated in postmodern Britain. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it takes a closer look at the objectives of education as per another major civilization with a rich educational heritage–that is, the Islamic tradition–and compares the two distinct philosophies. The research finds that the contemporary British philosophy of education has several drawbacks due to focusing only on building the economy and shaping a political worldview. As such, this paper discusses how Britain might mitigate its current weaknesses by suggesting to integrate the Islamic model of education (tarbiyah) in order to foster personal development, civic engagement, and objectivity in research, learning, and producing new knowledge-without the need compromise its strong economy.

The politics of the excluded: abjection and reconciliation amongst the British precariat

In this paper, we use a powerful empirical resource to address what the popular politics of disadvantage might entail in contemporary Britain. We take advantage of the unusually rich qualitative data from the British National Child Development Study, a cohort of Britons born in 1 week in 1958, to focus specifically on the accounts of those who are particularly disadvantaged. By concentrating on these a small number of qualitative accounts, which have been rigorously selected from the wider nationally representative sample on the basis of their relatively small amounts of economic and cultural capital, we will explore in detail the accounts and identities of these disadvantaged Britons with a view to explicating their political frameworks, their social identities and more broadly their orientations towards mobilisation.