Brexit literature’s present absentees : Triangulating Brexit, anti-Semitism, and the Palestinian crisis

Moore, L. (2020) Brexit literature’s present absentees : Triangulating Brexit, anti-Semitism, and the Palestinian crisis. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56 (5). pp. 621-635. ISSN 1744-9855

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Abstract

This article addresses a blind spot in Brexit literary criticism: Britain’s relationship to the Middle East, particularly its historic responsibility for the plight of Palestinians. Although fiction that directly engages both Brexit and the Israeli–Palestinian crisis has not yet appeared, oblique connections can be illuminated. Shared conceptual fields, albeit ones only partially brought into view in contemporary British fiction, emerge from intersecting historical experiences. The article considers a range of recent literary texts, with an emphasis on A Stranger City (2019) by British Jewish author Linda Grant and Fractured Destinies: A Novel (2018) by British Palestinian author Raba’i al-Madhoun. When viewed in a certain light, Brexit motifs of enclosure, displacement, and propinquity limn the Palestinian crisis as well as the spectre of anti-Semitism, revealing Britain’s role in the shaping of the modern Middle East as part of contemporary British literature’s political unconscious.