This presentation will discuss whether nationhood and national identities might serve progressive political ends in contemporary England – an important question in the context of Brexit, an imperilled United Kingdom and the Labour Party’s apparent shift towards a more explicit patriotism. Building on arguments made in a recently published book, based on a qualitative research project undertaken in 2015, I will first introduce the theoretical backdrop of the talk – a mixture of nationalism studies and critical theory informed by postcolonial analysis – before critiquing the most prominent political science accounts of England’s political predicament. I will argue that a more ethnographic approach to nationalism and national identities as they are manifested on the ground provides further evidence of nationhood’s limited salience at the everyday level and of its fundamentally exclusionary nature. However, while nationhood itself may be attenuated, and perhaps increasingly so for a large part of the population, the nationalist state and associated affinities and identifications remain dominant, even among the most cosmopolitan of England’s residents (and among the most critical of academics). In the absence of alternative identifications and institutions through which we might feasibly achieve collective political goals I argue that the cosmopolitan and post-colonial left should consider a more positive yet fundamentally equivocal relationship with the nation-state in England.

 

Charles Leddy-Owen is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. Since 2014 he has written numerous journal articles and a book – Nationalism, Inequality and England’s Political Predicament – exploring racism and nationalism in contemporary England. His most recent article was published in the Sociology special issues on nationalism. Charles is the editor of the ‘Nationalism and Racism’ section of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Race and Racism.

 

The seminar will take place at 5pm on Zoom. Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/centre-for-ethnicity-and-citizenship-seminar-charles-leddy-owen-tickets-141261211085?aff=ebdssbeac