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Speaker:

Taking the 80th anniversary of the first publication of George Orwell’s famous essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” as a starting point, this workshop will examine discourses of identity and belonging in the United Kingdom since the Second World War.

 In his famous essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” from 1941, Orwell outlined the vision of a reconciliation of democracy, socialism and patriotism. Writing at the height of the Second World War, Orwell prefigured a range of topics which came to represent powerful fault lines in many disputes about social and national identifications in the United Kingdom since 1945: nation versus class, “global Britain” versus “little England”, decolonisation versus multiculturalism, “mass democracy” versus “the Establishment”, among others. By taking these fault lines as entry points, the workshop is interested in the question as to why and in which way “identity” became such an important topic in British academic and public debate since the Second World War.

By focusing on discourses of identity formation, the workshop aims to shift the historiographical perspective away from attempts to explicitly define identity and toward the mechanisms that led to periods of public and political introspection of this subject. On a methodological and theoretical level, this perspective allows to draw conclusions about competing concepts of “identity” itself – a technical term that so far has rarely been understood as a category with its own intellectual history. In order to differentiate the actual analytical utility of popular concepts of belonging such as “Britishness”, “Englishness”, “Scottishness” from their wider political and cultural significance, their intellectual presuppositions must be critically examined.

The workshop will take place online via Zoom. Papers will be pre-circulated. To register, please write to nikolai.wehrs@uni-konstanz.de