BREXIT WOUNDS: ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESPONSES TO LEAVING THE EU: INTRODUCTION

Abstract

This special issue offers a timely and current critical evaluation of the morbid symptoms and potential wounds of ‘Brexit Culture’ as its implications, causes and effects unravel in front of a global audience via multiple media in real time. Brexit cultures, for the purposes of our articles here, attends to the role of cultural production in forging political choices, and to the cultural dimensions of Brexit – as a response to living in times of crisis and uncertainty. Departing from solely political or economic evaluations of Brexit’s effects, contributions to the special issue explore how the humanities and social sciences, artists and writers engage with the challenges, threats and potential disasters of Brexit. This issue interrogates how multiple constituencies that make up the inhabitants of the UK deal with a climate of continued uncertainty about definitions and effects of Brexit as they unfold in everyday cultural practices and specific locations, and what kind of responses or symptoms we can identify in current discourses of national and international culture. In these unusual and unprecedented circumstances, this issue brings together academics and practitioners from the arts, humanities and social sciences in a creative and constructive dialogue around the cultural issues posed by Brexit. The articles cover subjects such as migration, citizenship and populism, violent borders and hostile environments, Brexit as an empty vessel, imaginary landscapes, fictions of the nation, banal nationalism, Brexit wounds – hurts, pains and feelings. They reflect on conceptualisations of Brexit as disaster, deferral, delay and repetition, Brexlit and new cultural forms, Brexit metaphors and tautologies, populism and resistance, citizenship, race and belonging, Brexit’s effects on individuals, communities and constructions or depictions of families.