Other Brexit Imaginaries: Race, Class the crisis of Liberal Britain
Topics: Political Geography
, Ethnicity and Race
, Immigration/Transnationalism
Keywords: Liberalism, Race, Class, Brexit, Immigration, Nationalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 77
Authors:
Arshad Isakjee, University of Liverpool
Colin Lorne, Open University
Thom Davies, University of Nottingham
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Abstract
Since the Brexit referendum geographers and sociologists have moved to identify and spatialise the underlying forces that propelled the ‘Leave’ campaign to win a referendum to leave the European Union. As part of this, much needed work has been done to identify how the politics of race and austerity in particular, contributed to post-colonial malaise, and the declinist narratives of nationalism, from which the ‘Leave’ campaigns drew considerable strength. These forces and their attendant imaginaries have shaped how British citizens on one side of the ‘Brexit divide’ have begun to understand themselves in the context of post-imperialism, immigration and a liberalised economy.
However, less attention has been focussed on the opposing liberal imaginaries, on the other side of this ‘divide’. For many liberal ‘Remainers’ who have been politicised by the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, the event of Brexit marks an abrupt, unexpected paradigm shift in British politics, before what seems like a ‘re-emergence’ of racist anti-immigrant politics and mainstream advocacy of far-right political agenda. For geographers this might be seen as a turn away from the ‘openness’ of the era that preceded it, characterised by the emergence of New Labour. On further inspection however, the hostile policies in relation to immigration, and the persistence of liberal economics as a method to challenge regional decline had embedded themselves in the romanticised decades that preceded Brexit. This paper will seek to explore the liberal hegemony and its attendant imaginaries which preceded the Brexit referendum, in the spheres of economy and immigration.
Other Brexit Imaginaries: Race, Class the crisis of Liberal Britain
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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