Border Anxieties and The Politics of BrexLit

This article discusses a recent genre of BrexLit – literary works that have anticipated or directly responded to the Brexit referendum in 2016 – and its contribution to the cartography of political writing in Europe. The events preceding and following the Brexit vote witnessed a flourishing cultural and literary activity. What is now discussed under the category of ‘BrexLit’ encompasses a growing thematic and generic richness - state-of-the-nation novels, crime and thrillers, dystopian narratives, poetry, drama and essays. Focusing on a selection of Brexit poetry that have so far not received much critical attention, and novels and non-fiction that have tended to identify with the Remain position, I explore how these texts capture the zeitgeist of Brexit. I look at the ways in which they contest the politics of borders and expose the desire to take back control of national sovereignty as being deeply rooted in Britain’s unresolved post-imperial fantasies. I analyse the anxieties surrounding post-2004 EU migration and the tensions between the discourses of Euroscepticism and Europhilia, placing these works in the context of wider and unresolved debates about the nation’s imperial legacy. I conclude by offering my own contribution to the genre with a poem entitled ‘Communist Balcony’ that unsettles the politics of borders through an oppositional discourse centring the ‘Eastern European’ migrant experience.