This book has had a long gestation, but the final years of writing have been enmeshed in the political and social turmoil prompted by the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) held on 23 June 2016. The referendum launched a new set of political identifiers—Remainer and Leaver—that have entrenched as the years have rolled on, which, as Sarah B. Hobolt et al. argue, ‘has had a highly polarizing effect’ as people maintain their passionately held views and animus towards their opposite number (2018: 20). The UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020, and still debates rage about whether the nation is plummeting towards the disastrous economic and social turmoil Remainers predicted or whether it will be the bright new dawn promulgated by Leavers. The one thing startlingly apparent is that Brexit exposed deep and keenly felt national divisions and competing versions of national identity. It laid bare a nation divided by class, education, geography, age and political affiliation which, after the vote, could be mapped onto easily legible statistics that pitted the young against the elderly; the working class against the liberal metropolitan elite; those university-educated against those who were not and struggling towns against regenerated cities.
Clearly, the public’s attitudes towards the European Union are entangled in values, with ‘a powerful emotional component’ that reach far beyond warmth or hostility towards EU membership or a fight for sovereignty (Clarke et al. 2017: 147). The vote and its aftermath instead became embroiled in debates around diversity, multiculturalism and immigration, as well as the perceived causes of persistent social inequalities and the divergent economic trajectories of some towns and cities. Public anxiety with immigration in a climate bruised by the refugee crisis defined the run-up to the referendum as ‘[d]ebates about the ability of Western governments to control immigration, secure their borders and protect citizens from terrorism intensified’ (Clarke et al. 2017: 12). Many Leave voters cited discomfort not only with the numbers of migrants, but also their access to welfare benefits and the increasing ethnic diversity in the towns and cities where they live. A ‘structure of feeling’, to adopt a term introduced by Raymond Williams, ripe for exploitation by the right-wing populism of Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party who tapped into deep concerns with ‘rapacious banks, corporate greed, economic inequality and social injustice’ in such a way as to make the party and its divisive rhetoric ‘a disruptive and unexpectedly potent political force’ (Williams 1961; Clarke et al. 2017: 110). It is no wonder then that many voters were seduced by the increasingly xenophobic tone of the Leave campaign with its slogans of ‘Get our country back’, ‘take back control’ and ‘make Britain great again’ that Anshuman A. Mondal ascribes to ‘still-resonant imperial-era imaginaries and ideologies’ that served to unite ‘working class leavers in the post-industrial wastelands of 21st-century Britain and the well-to-do leavers in the leafy Tory shires’ (2018: 83–85). Reversing Lauren Berlant’s critique of ‘cruel optimism’, Robert Eaglestone has described this impulse as a form of ‘cruel nostalgia’, understood as ‘a form of affect-memory’ (2018: 92–96). Affect memory is closely aligned to Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’, but in this case Eaglestone allies it to a sense that something has been lost and a keenly felt desire to regain what it signifies. Brexit, then, appealed to the ‘affect-memory’ that the nation had been transformed—by migration and globalisation—and that it was time to instigate a pause, or at best, a reversal in the trajectory of the nation. Importantly, affect is more than just feeling or emotion, it captures something of ‘the cultural atmosphere in which our emotions form’ (Eaglestone 2018: 93). As such, affect is both individual and relational, it draws down on the ‘cultural atmosphere’ to activate and sustain it. As this suggests, affect is a movable feast, atmospheres change and give off different social cues that create what Berlant has termed ‘ambient citizenship’ (2011: 223).
I should be clear that Brexit is not the subject of this book. Brexit wasn’t even a twinkling on the horizon when I started working on the ideas driving this research, but the climate that led to Brexit, its historical antecedents and the way it highlighted a nation riven with division, is. The book emerges from a conviction that the English nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts and fissures that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens that need to be contained or expelled. It is about how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and about how theatre is implicated in both counter-hegemonic and resistant narratives that question and challenge, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries that become attached to groups that fuel the kind of ‘cultural atmosphere’ that fuelled Brexit. My thinking on this topic has been inspired by Imogen Tyler’s book Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, in which she identifies the conceptual paradigm of ‘social abjection’ and the presence of ‘social abjects’ who are spurned by neoliberalism, vilified as antithetical to the nation and as a result ‘are imagined and configured as revolting and become subject to control, stigma and censure’ (2013: 3–4). Throughout her analysis Tyler raises important questions that drive this book: who is central, who is peripheral, who is included or excluded, valued or demeaned and how do the answers to these questions fold into a cultural imaginary of the nation? Beverley Skeggs, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, has also identified how the space of the nation has a particularly powerful role to play in establishing identity and a sense of self. She writes:
Within the nation, national belonging constitutes the symbolic capital of the field, and to belong is to be legitimate. That is, the aim of accumulating national capital is precisely to convert it into national belonging, to have accumulated national cultural capital recognized as legitimately national by the dominant cultural grouping. (2004: 19)
For Skeggs, the ‘metaphorical space’ of the nation makes certain claims about who belongs, who has ‘national capital’, which ‘marks some bodies as more valuable than others’ and this has an impact on how individuals, groups and the nation are conceived (2004: 19).
Karen Shimakawa’s work on how Asian American citizens are cast as abject provides a useful exemplar of how this approach shores up the national imaginary. Read as abject, she writes, ‘Asian Americanness thus occupies a role both necessary to and mutually constitutive of national subject formation…[f]or U.S Americanness to maintain its symbolic coherence, the national abject continually must be both made present and jettisoned’ (2002: 3). Throughout English Theatre and Social Abjection: A Divided Nation, I’m particularly interested in the ways that certain groups of people are figured in terms of national division, a state of non-belonging, or as outright threats to national safety, coherence and ways of life, which is crucial to how the nation, described by Benedict Anderson as an ‘imagined community’, is understood, but also how individuals understand their position and value within the nation (2006 [1983]). Importantly, though, as Tyler insists, ‘What the conceptual frame of abjection reveals is that neither the subject nor the nation-state is a solid or unitary entity, but rather an assemblage of practices’ continually being made anew not least through culture (2013: 46). In asserting this view Tyler echoes earlier work by Skeggs on how class and gender are produced through classifying processes that rely on ‘systems of inscription’—rhetoric, representation, discourse—that ‘positions some groups as the ground of fixity, otherness, strangeness and danger’ (2004: 155).
Building on Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection as both a state and a process, Revolting Subjects examines the way that people are made abject—and considers abjection as a ‘mode of governmentality’ and as a lived social process rooted in material circumstances that, as Skeggs proposes, has ‘very real effects which are lived on a daily basis’ (Tyler 2013: 21; Skeggs 1997: 2). These effects might include someone’s sense of themselves on the social hierarchy and an acute consciousness of how they are viewed, as Skeggs notes of the women she studies, ‘[t]hey operate with a dialogic form of recognition: they recognize the recognitions of others’ (1997: 4). Looking at the state-sanctioned policies, political rhetoric, media discourse and popular cultural representations that cast people as socially abject, Tyler asks what it means for individuals and communities as they navigate their place on the margins of society. What does it mean to be denigrated and subject to symbolic and material violence? And, what possibilities are there for contesting and resisting the processes and consequences of social abjection? Significantly, Tyler is alert to how groups experience social abjection differently—a homeless person will be made socially abject and experience this state of abjection differently from an asylum seeker. There is also an awareness, as in the work of Skeggs, that these processes of classifying or figuring are not fixed, but open to challenge and refusals that suggest ‘the temporality and instability not only of identification but also of the concepts and signs that define what identification actually means’ (Skeggs 1997: 165).
Encouraging a critical engagement with these socially abjectifying processes and their potential to be resisted, Tyler urges that,
We need to examine the mechanisms through which norms of abjection are fabricated, operationalized and internalized. It is only by critically engaging with abjection as contingent expressions of normativity that we might begin to disarticulate the effects of abjection as lived. (Tyler 20...