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This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990: British Muslim Bildungsromane, gothic tales of postcolonial England, the subcultural urban novel and multicultural British comedy.

The thirteen mainland colonies of early America were arguably never more British than on the eve of their War of Independence from Britain. Though home to settlers of diverse national and cultural backgrounds, colonial America gradually became more like Britain in its political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems, and engagements with the empire. At the same time and by the same process, these politically distinct and geographically distant colonies forged a shared cultural identityone that would bind them together as a nation during the Revolution. Anglicizing Americarevisits the theory of Anglicization, considering its application to the history of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses, at key moments before, during, and after the American Revolution. Ten essays by senior historians trace the complex processes by which global forces, local economies, and individual motives interacted to reinforce a more centralized and unified social movement. They examine the ways English ideas about labor influenced plantation slavery, how Great Britain's imperial aspirations shaped American militarization, the influence of religious tolerance on political unity, and how Americans' relationship to Great Britain after the war impacted the early republic's naval and taxation policies. As a whole,Anglicizing Americaoffers a compelling framework for explaining the complex processes at work in the western hemisphere during the age of revolutions. Contributors: Denver Brunsman, William Howard Carter, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Anthony M. Joseph, Simon P. Newman, Geoffrey Plank, Nancy L. Rhoden, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman, Jeremy A. Stern.

This book provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness, as well as a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does it provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on ‘The English Question’, but it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question, addressing the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first part looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as legends of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second part considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity, of how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third part revisits these legends and anxieties, examining them in terms of the actual and metaphorical ‘locations’ of Englishness: regionalism, Europeanism and Britishness.

This collection explores British attitudes to Continental Europe that explain the Brexit decision. Addressing British-European entanglements and the impact of British Euroscepticism, the book argues that Britain is in denial about the strength of its ties to Europe. The volume brings together literary and cultural studies, history, and political science in an integrated analysis of views and practices that shape cultural memory. Part one traces the historical and political relationship between Britain and Europe, whilst Part two is devoted to exemplary case studies of films as well as popular Eurosceptic and historical fiction. Part three engages with border mindedness and Britain’s island story. The book is addressed both to specialists in cultural studies, and a wider audience interested in Brexit.

In this article we seek to problematize the presence of the requirement within the teachers' standards (DfE, 2012), that they 'should not undermine fundamental British values' in the context of initial teacher education in England. The inclusion of this statement within the teachers' code of conduct has made its way from the counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent and raises questions about Britishness, values and the relationship between the state and the profession more generally. We argue that the inclusion of the phrase within a statutory document that regulates the profession is de facto a politicization of the profession by the state thereby instilling the expectation that teachers are state instruments of surveillance. The absence of any wider debate around the inclusion of the statement is also problematic as is the lack of training for pre-service and inservice teachers since it means this concept of fundamental British values is unchallenged and its insidious racialising implications are unrecognised by most teachers.

This piece follows Stuart Ward's Untied Kingdom as it traverses a collapsing British Empire and an increasingly disunited United Kingdom to tell the complex history of Britishness in retreat across the world, mainly between 1945 and the early twenty-first century. It reviews some of the shifting meanings of Britishness that Ward charts in different contexts, different territories and at different moments in this history and the dwindling resonance of Britishness almost everywhere. It reviews other main themes that thread through the book: language, migration, race, belonging and unbelonging, nationalism, violence, and the impact of imperialism and colonialism on cultures, societies and mindsets.

Identity matters in British politics. This article builds on previous research on both ethnocentric voting and studies of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s leadership to argue that, between entering the House of Commons in May 2015 and resigning as Foreign Secretary in July 2018, Johnson did not personally use language in his writing or speeches that appealed to ethnocentric voters. Instead, using a corpus analysis of Johnson’s representation in three national right-of-centre newspapers, this article demonstrates that he was linked to an uncritical, nationalistic and nostalgic vision of Britain by two of those newspapers (The Sun and The Daily Mail). Johnson was the beneficiary of this link, allowing him to appeal to ethnocentric voters on both sides of the political divide without himself having to use inflammatory or divisive language to make his appeal.

In his rhetoric on Britain and Britishness, David Cameron sets out a vision of the nation and its national story built upon the premise of exceptionalism. I argue this was challenging to reconcile with continued EU membership. His efforts to rhetorically define the nation and his ethos subsequently came to undermine his stewardship of the Remain campaign and Britain’s EU membership. In this article, I analyse Cameron’s party conference rhetoric on Britain and Britishness between 2006 and 2015 using the framework of Rhetorical Political Analysis. I argue that Cameron styles the nation as in possession of an exceptional history, spirit, and set of values. The British people are said to be uniquely principled, generous, and tolerant, with an uncommon aptitude for leadership. Additionally, the country is framed as having an exceptional past, present, and future. His conception of Britishness, built upon the myth of exceptionalism, jars with continued membership of the EU due to contrasting values, and along with his Eurosceptic credentials, ultimately left a weak foundation for the Remain campaign in 2016.

This article argues that the leading article, or leader, of a newspaper played a role in the ‘secular’ society of colonial Australia not unlike that of the sermon in the religious sphere. One of its primary objectives was moral exhortation to encourage Australian colonists to follow a path that would enable the colony to fulfil providence and create an appropriate moral order. Their celebration of the British political order was a form of civil theology that matched the more dogmatic theology to be found in church sermons. This similarity was also assisted by the fact that a significant number of clergy either edited newspapers or wrote for them. This article considers several expressions of this civil theology, and then concentrates on the Rev John West who edited the Sydney Morning Herald and who used his leading articles to castigate his fellow colonists for their failure to live up to the ideals of their British political heritage. He was particularly harsh on the workings of colonial democracy which led him into conflict with another cleric, the Rev John Dunmore Lang.

Between the 1910s and 1930s, male migrants from colonial Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) contested South Africa's internal and external barriers to free movement by asserting their rights as British subjects. On the principle that 'fair play' and 'justice' extended throughout the British empire, these men claimed an entitlement to migrate, work and live 'unmolested' across South Africa. This article foregrounds the early political agendas of these men, demanding a 'liberal' empire that sanctioned the intra-imperial migration of its black subjects. By examining a number of crises, it demonstrates how 'loyalty' to 'Britishness' was differentiated and particularist, being publicly deployed when the ostensibly 'British' principle of 'free labour' was undermined by the process of South African state formation. While radical Nyasa internationalists used British-informed lexicons of freedom to demand a more universal approach to free movement, early Nyasa nationalists invoked British colonial borders to justify a particular, restricted vision of intra-imperial migration that excluded non-British black immigrants. By exploring these differences, the article questions what we mean by 'free movement' and shows that ideas of imperial citizenship were not only reclaimed 'from the bottom up' by Nyasas but also deconstructed and instrumentalised.