Warning signs: Postcolonial writing and the apprehension of Brexit

This article considers how postcolonial fiction anticipated, apprehended, and critically explored the political and cultural milieu which facilitated the outcome of the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum. In suggesting that “Brexit Literature” existed before Brexit was formally pursued, it understands Brexit as driving an English nationalism that unnervingly appropriates the history of the British Empire and World War II. It uncovers the representation of these manoeuvres in a number of key texts. Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore both logs and challenges the malevolent imagining of newcomers that has deep roots in notions of war and empire. Zadie Smith’s NW represents post-crash austerity as proleptically exposing the complex politics of race and class which fuelled the pro-Brexit populism that lies latent in the novel. Ultimately, the article calls for a post-Brexit postcolonialism that harnesses the power of critical thought to continue the long-standing contestation of the prevailing political orthodoxy

Miasmatic Performance

This article distils and disinters the socio-legal airs of a term, miasma, largely known in the contemporary period as a discredited theory of disease causation. For millennia miasma has been a confused diagnostic, ascribing religious, medical, social and legal pronouncements in an attempt to define the origins of corruption: not (purely) of air, but corruptions of persons passing through the commons. Today, miasma’s fogs continue to envelop and shape society within climates of stigma. Returning to miasma, I suggest here, can offer ways of articulating the performance registers of social stigma as a carceral power. In this article I develop a concept of miasmatic performance as a way to subvert and counter-map the criminalizing impact of stigma in carceral society. I contend that considering miasma as a performance register of law can also help to indicate its climates of extra- and interlegality. Miasmatic performance describes theatre’s ability to create dissident connections and intensify audience awareness of their own social performance from within carceral society. Performance strategies in the works I investigate here reposition criminal identities as porous, intersubjective conditions; they circumvent perceptions of the stigmatized as other, avert redemption narratives, and delay or deny cathartic resolution. Miasmatic performance makes stigma part of the collectivity of a performance as it subtends and twists temporalities, social and legal conditioning, and the limits of the collective body