Laura Chrisman
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Transnational productions of Englishness
South Africa in the post-imperial metropole
in Postcolonial contraventions

The transformation of English national identity began with Margaret Thatcher's 1979 government. The contemporary production of Englishness became, and continues to be, labour intensive, because England had lost the material foundation of that identity. The recently reformulated Englishness, variously referred to as ‘the new racism’ or ‘Thatcherism’, equates national community with the white race. This nationalist discourse eschews the openly racist language of biological superiority and uses, instead, the more coded language of cultural difference, to promote an English nation that is culturally homogeneous and exclusively white. The diasporic and postcolonial perspectives respectively contribute in important ways to the analysis of post-imperial Englishness. The element of cultural identity that emerges from this chapter contains both the element of Gilroy's xenophobia and that of Huggan's neo-colonial paternalism. The chapter concludes by addressing the impact of the contemporary liberation movement, and explores the historical relationship.

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Postcolonial contraventions

Cultural readings of race, imperialism and transnationalism

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