Brexlit: Redefining Borders

In the late 1980s, Stuart Hall identified the success of Thatcherite conservatism in the way it addressed “the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people” underling how important it was to “think about politics in images” (Hall 1988: 167). Thatcherism was “addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary [...] while the left forlornly trie[d] to drag the conversation round to ‘our policies’” (ibidem). The new “Great Moving Right Show” (Hall 1979) of the Brexit years seems to have been performed using the same patterns and cultural strategies of Thatcherism; its utopian or retrotopian (Bauman 2017) idea of ‘Making Britain Great Again’ was constructed around new nostalgic myths of past imperial greatness and iconic images of a recovered splendid isolation that convey anti-European and anti-migrant sentiments. Drawing on the shared idea that literature and performing arts can not only encourage empathy and help create a sense of community (Nussbaum 2010) but also effectively “engage with emergent political realities” (Shaw 2018: 16), especially through the voices of intellectuals in the public sphere, this issue intends to focus on literary works, also in their intermedial relations with other arts, that deal with the impact of Brexit on the life, thoughts and feelings of British society.