“Politics of racism” and BrexLit: Questioning the racially labelled entities in Ali Smith’s Autumn

ABSTRACT

Racism sits at the centre of the UK’s debates about Brexit and BrexLit. Contemporary commentators have tended to reduce to racial issues the intricate economic and political aspirations of Brexit supporters in 2016. Ali Smith’s Autumn, for example, a prominent example of Brexit fiction, is generally believed to represent racist bias in dealing with Brexit, through two encounters – the fence scene and the passport episode – seen as embodying working class racism against immigrants in rural England. This article argues instead that such earlier interpretations of Autumn are limited by the so-called “politics of racism”, used to define working class worries about uncontrolled immigration unleashed by global capitalism. Referring to the aesthetic style of the collage created by Pauline Boty, an avant-garde painter of 1960s Britain, whose work is elevated in the novel as an illuminating discovery by the protagonist, Elisabeth, it proposes an alternative interpretation that highlights inclusiveness above all.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• BrexLit
• Ali Smith
• working class
• thing
• object

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For UK political issues in the run-up to the referendum, see Serious Sweet (Kennedy 2016) and The Lie of the Land (Craig 2017). For satire against political deals before and after Brexit, see Kompromat (Johnson 2017) and Cockroach (McEwan 2019). For worries about the future of Britain after Brexit, see Euphoria (Helle 2017) and Time of Lies (Board 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Social Science Fund of China [16WW010].

Notes on contributors

Xiaohui Liang

Xiaohui Liang is Professor of English Literature and Comparative Literature at University of Science and Technology Beijing, China. Her research interests include contemporary British fiction, postcolonial ecocriticism, and body and cognition in posthuman narratives. Her work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Language and Literature, among others.