| Summary: | Perhaps one of the most significant votes in British history occurred in June 2016. Primarily dominated by buzzwords such as ‘control’, ‘borders’ and ‘immigration’, Brexit has been a hugely divisive process for the UK. This division and internal wall-building is nowhere more evident than in domestic British race relations; indeed, in the week following the referendum, the number of racial hate crimes committed rose by 500%. This article examines the idea of borders in a contemporary British context, drawing on historic and recurrent iterations of empire (historical colonialism and the Windrush Scandal) and the Second World War as a founding national mythologies. It argues that Brexit represents post-war paranoia regarding European invasion, nostalgia for the glory days of Empire, and a fear of the post-colonial ‘other’ as a threat to monolithic tenets of British identity. Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, is harnessed throughout as a means of giving literary scope to these arguments, and as a means of highlighting how this manic obsession with borders is a long-standing aspect of British life (the novel was published in 2000 and therefore preceded the Brexit conversation). Moreover, discussion of the themes of non-white British identities, inter-racial breeding and genetics in Smith’s novel will be placed alongside a contemplation of ‘maternity tourism’ which has recently abounded in the British press. ‘Maternity tourism’ comprises, I argue, a fear of the post-colonial female body and a distrust of the maternal body as a weak border which threatens the cohesive, white homogeneity of British society.
|
|---|