Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author of Japanese descent who has established himself globally as an award-winning writer of bestselling books. This article deals with the hybridity of the author, who is both Japanese and English, a popular writer who stirs reader emotions but is at the same time respected by critics. The article begins by addressing the ‘Japaneseness’ in Ishiguro’s work that is both obvious and skilfully concealed. In the second part, the article examines the reception of Ishiguro’s work by Slovenian readers and discusses potential reasons for their seeming lack of response.

Transatlantic Lifelines: Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”

The legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, the distinguished Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the subject of numerous claims to memorialization. On 17 October 1586 Sidney died in battle at Arnhem in the United Netherlands. Less than a week later, his corpse was transported to Flushing, of which Sidney had been Governor, and in the following year Sidney’s body was “interr’d in stately Pauls”, as recorded by Anne Dudley Bradstreet—the first known poet of the British North American colonies. While Bradstreet is omitted from most early modern and contemporary literary accounts of Sidney’s legacy, this article demonstrates that Bradstreet’s commemoration of Sidney from across the Atlantic presents new insights into his afterlife and the female poet’s formulations of early modern nationhood. Bradstreet’s first formal poem, “An Elegie upon that Honorable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (comp. 1637–8), was a tribute to Sidney as well as to her own Anglo-American literary heritage and England’s rolls. Bradstreet exhibits her complex relationship to Sidney along the same lines that she reconceives her English identity. A comparison of the two published seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s elegiac poem (1650, 1678) shows how she translates descent and lineage from kinship (and kingship) into poetic creation. In the process, Bradstreet takes her place not only as a “semi-Sidney”, as Josuah Sylvester characterized Sidney’s descendants, but also as a Sidneian Muse—in America.

Coda

The larger intersection between word and image, as a way of presenting English identity and especially the countryside, is demonstrated in the films of Humphrey Jennings and the engravings of F. L. Griggs, both suggesting an ideal under threat, first by change, then by coming war. Some government publications offer a final address to the idea of a lost Eden. Edwin Lutyens’ Thiepval memorial, a series of intersecting arches to contain over 70 000 names of the missing, balances the Cenotaph in using words to dominate idea and form. Elsewhere, words and images collapse into each other, as in H. G.Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through. The final concern is with what is revealed by the kinds of verbal and visual works discussed throughout the book: a series of glimpses into a society revolving around the home and an imagined countryside, with a mixture of sincerity and vulnerability.

Securing the borders of English and Whiteness

This article examines how racial and linguistic identities are constructed on the Australian reality TV show Border Security. Based on an analysis of 108 episodes of the show involving 253 border force officers and 128 passengers, we explore how the hegemonic Australian identity of the White native speaker of English is constructed on the show. Officers are represented as a relatively uniform group of heroes devoted to protecting Australia’s national security. Simultaneously, most of them look white and sound like native speakers of Australian English. In contrast to the officers, passengers, as their antagonists, do not have a predominant racial or linguistic profile. They are represented as highly diverse. What unites them is not any racial or linguistic profile but that they represent a security risk. Threat thus comes to be mapped onto diversity. The show’s schema of heroes and antagonists invites the audience to identify with the heroes. By identifying with the White-English heroes, the audience also comes to take on their power of judgment over its diverse linguistic and racial Others. The analysis shows how the White-English identity bundle is constructed as the authoritative and legitimate position of the judging knower. The article’s main contribution is to show how the raciolinguistic construct of the White-English complex is made hegemonic in a diverse society officially committed to multiculturalism.

Fuzzy Frontiers? Testing the Fluidity of National, Partisan and Brexit Identities in the Aftermath of the 2016 Referendum

British and English national identities have long been considered to have porous boundaries whereby English individuals consider the terms more or less interchangeable. However, there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate whether primary feelings of either Britishness or Englishness are highly fluid within-individuals or whether individuals are consistent in their perceptions of their British or English identity. This is especially relevant in the post-Brexit referendum context where national identity is highly correlated with Brexit attitudes. Using panel data, we demonstrate that there is a notable degree of fluidity between identifying as British or English. This is higher than the fluidity between other national identities in the UK as well as more fluid than moving between any partisan or EU referendum identities. Remainers are more fluid than Leavers in their Englishness, whereas they are similar in the fluidity of their Britishness.

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.

Landscapes and Identities

This chapter pulls together the themes of the volume as a whole, looking back at the nature of the evidence, providing a synthesis of landscape use and considering again issues of identities. We review the nature of our evidence, as well as the possibilities and difficulties posed by working with large amounts of information. We review the broader differences found across England, either side of a line roughly from Torquay to Whitby, where south and east of that line more settlements and artefacts occurred than north and west. These differences indicate long-term contrasts in ways of life in both areas. We end by considering the complex question of identities, taking seriously issues of scale. An English identity was produced through a political project in the early medieval period and would not have existed in this form earlier.

The Public and the Union

Public attitudes to the Union are complex. Citizens in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are aware of the choice between British and local identity. Most of them combine both but with different intensities. Citizens in England are now willing to make the same distinctions. There has not been a marked increase in non-British identities in recent years but their political significance has changed. Support for independence in Scotland has increased and is linked to identity. Support for reunification in Northern Ireland fell after the 1999 settlement but has fluctuated since. In Wales, a narrow majority for devolution in the referendum of 1997 shifted towards broad support as the National Assembly (now Senedd) matured. Brexit led to an increase in support for Scottish independence and Irish reunification but not to a decisive degree. There has not been a significant increase in English identity or support for an English Parliament. Citizens in England are not mostly opposed to devolution for the other territories and are, by international standards, often relaxed about the prospect of the secession of Scotland and Northern Ireland. There is a clear link between strong English identity and support for leaving the European Union.