Volume 70, Issue 2 - Special Issue: British Borders: Negotiations in Anglophone Literatures; Guest Editors: Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker

Borderlands are not just zones bisected by a border but are also conceptual spaces and areas defined by ‘borderwork’ activities. Eighteenth-century Glasgow was one such area, in which the typical activities associated with borderlands – tax evasion, feuds, and violence as a hallmark of inter-community relations or resistance to an overmighty state and its lieutenants – shaped the effort to produce a new ‘British’ identity after 1707. This article examines two instances of riot in Glasgow and emphasises the importance of the role played by lower-status actors and prevailing concepts of fairness in forging the Anglo-Scottish Union in one of its most important cities.

In A Modern Utopia (1905), H. G. Wells prophesised that emergent technologies of personal identification such as fingerprinting and central registries would enable the dismantling of national borders. Situating Wells’s novel as a literary expression of a period of experimentation in European mobility control at the turn of the twentieth century, this essay argues that Wells’s ideas about controlled borderlessness were indeed highly prescient, anticipating the recent rise of supranational mobility control à la the EU’s Schengen cooperation. If Wells’s theorisation of mobility control was ahead of its time, then so was his suspenseful narrative about undocumented aliens in utopia fearfully navigating a supranational surveillance state. In this essay I emphasise the correspondences between Wells’s delineation of controlled borderlessness and modern-day supranational mobility control, whilst also highlighting discrepancies and discordant notes in Wells’s bureaucratic-technocratic utopian vision.

This article connects Alan Moore’s comics V for Vendetta (1982–1989) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. I (1999–2000) and Vol. II (2002–2003) with contemporary UK politics, particularly with Brexit, populism, and the idea of British exceptionalism and its link to Britain’s nostalgic relationship with its past as an empire. It argues that particularly through Moore’s monstrous protagonists, who transgress a multitude of cultural borders, established mindsets, stereotypes, and prejudices are challenged, and complicated and uncomfortable questions are raised – thereby setting a stark contrast to the overly simplifying pseudo-answers handed out by populism.

In Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018), an archaeology class pitches camp near Hadrian’s Wall, where they are joined by a local family in an experimental re-enactment of Iron Age Britain. The novel explores nostalgic nationalism, fantasies of nativism and racial supremacy, and the wish for containment and boundaries in a contemporary world perceived as having lost its cultural core. Following Wendy Brown’s suggestion to read the desire to erect border walls as the symptom of a hysterical obsession with ‘the alien,’ this essay focuses on the construction of borders as ritual spectacles aimed at securing deeply gendered fantasies of innocence, regulation, and containment, and how this aligns with contemporary British national and cultural nostalgia. It will also explore the thematic connections and differences between Moss’s critical probing of reimagined old ways of life and the yearning for a wistful version of bygone Britishness perceptible in recent British nature and travel writings.

The British myth of World War II has long been successfully mobilised to police the ideological borders of the UK. The article considers narratives about the war as a key site for the negotiation of British identity and the UK’s relation to its imperial past. It, first, seeks to unpack some of the contradictions of the dominant British view on the war to then consider the 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy by Somali-British writer Nadifa Mohamed. It is argued that the novel effectively opposes ideas of an ethnically homogenous nation. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory, the article shows how the novel interweaves different traumatic histories and thus presents memories of the war as an opportunity, not to consolidate national borders, but to forge new solidarities.