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5 The Union and Jack: British masculinities, pomophobia, and the post-nation BERTHOLD SCHOENE Starting with a general theoretical investigation into nationalist imageries of masculine and feminine embodiment, this essay offers a tentative outline of some of the most problematic shifts in the conceptualisation and literary representation of man, self and nation in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The second part of the essay comprises a close reading of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1993 [1956]), which is to illustrate the syndromic inextricability
The concept of 'margins' denotes geographical, economic, demographic, cultural and political positioning in relation to a perceived centre. This book aims to question the term 'marginal' itself, to hear the voices talking 'across' borders and not only to or through an English centre. The first part of the book examines debates on the political and poetic choice of language, drawing attention to significant differences between the Irish and Scottish strategies. It includes a discussion of the complicated dynamic of woman and nation by Aileen Christianson, which explores the work of twentieth-century Scottish and Irish women writers. The book also explores masculinities in both English and Scottish writing from Berthold Schoene, which deploys sexual difference as a means of testing postcolonial theorizing. A different perspective on the notion of marginality is offered by addressing 'Englishness' in relation to 'migrant' writing in prose concerned with India and England after Independence. The second part of the book focuses on a wide range of new poetry to question simplified margin/centre relations. It discusses a historicising perspective on the work of cultural studies and its responses to the relationship between ethnicity and second-generation Irish musicians from Sean Campbell. The comparison of contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction which identifies similarities and differences in recent developments is also considered. In each instance the writers take on the task of examining and assessing points of connection and diversity across a particular body of work, while moving away from contrasts which focus on an English 'norm'.
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
Tollington – or indeed in white Britain more generally – has in fact been challenged or transformed by Meena’s presence.22 Stein himself seems to begin an acknowledgement of these limitations: he describes Meena as an indulger in fantasies, a girl who actively ‘positions herself’.23 Yet Stein does not take this as far as its ultimate conclusion: that the narrative itself is part of this talent for fabrication and conscious positioning. In the same way, Berthold Schoene-Harwood notices Meena’s tendency for falsehoods, even quoting the part of the epigraph I centre my
State (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1–2. 42 Stefanie Lehner, ‘Subaltern Scotland: Devolution and postcoloniality’ in Berthold Schoene (ed.) The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 300
Lea and Berthold Schoene ( Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2003 ), pp. 89 – 104 ; Hywel Dix , ‘ Devolution and Cultural Catch-Up ’, in Literature of an Independent England , ed. by Michael Gardiner and Claire Westall ( Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013 ), pp. 188 – 199 ; and
Scottish strategies; a discussion of the complicated dynamic of woman and nation by Aileen Christianson, which explores the work of twentieth-century Scottish and Irish women writers and assesses the relevance of a postcolonial context in understanding the ‘debatable’ boundaries arising from that intersection; an exploration of masculinities in both English and Scottish writing from Berthold Schoene, which also deploys sexual difference as a means of testing postcolonial theorising, but does so within the context of a discourse in which bodily, social and national
Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 8 Cairns Craig, ‘Beyond reason: Hume, Seth, Macmurray and Scotland’s postmodernity’, in Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller (eds) Scotland in GILMOUR 9781526108845 PRINT.indd 132 11/06/2020 11:00 Prosthetic language133 Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), p. 259. 9 Berthold Schoene discusses the idea of ‘postethnic’ Scottishness in ‘Going cosmopolitan: reconstructing “Scottishness” in
global twenty-first-century experience’. This preference for a ‘vertiginous range of locations’ (Schoene, 2009 : 143) has meant that much of the existing criticism on Kunzru identifies his work with questions of cosmopolitanism: Berthold Schoene ( 2009 ) reading Transmission as an exploration of the difference between the capital-driven forces of a homogenising globalisation and the
what Berthold Schoene has called Scotland’s ‘British postcolonial condition’ is undeniable, then so is its ambivalent and complex relationship to that condition, given the extensive implication of Scots and Scotland in the British Empire, and the consequently ‘duplicitous, conflicting status of Scotland as both (internal and external) colonising and colonised nation’.31 As Carla Sassi puts it, Scotland is a ‘stateless nation’ that has constructed its identity ‘in opposition to unjust cultural and political marginalisation within the United Kingdom’, but this