Britain’s national identity crisis resembles melancholic failure to mourn the empire

Evidence

Indeed it seems that we are witnessing the political proliferation of “diversity talk” while trading in the currency of rejuvenated national pride. Paul Gilroy has referred to this second impulse as a form of postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy, 1999), a condition that echoes the distinction made by Freud between a process of mourning that reckons with the loss of bereavement and eternal cycles of solipsism and neurosis. In Freud’s reflections he talks about the ways in which the object of melancholia can sometimes be elusive: ”… one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either” (Freud, 1991:254). Similar things might also be said of the crisis of equally impalpable ideas like Englishness and whiteness. For Gilroy, British political life is caught like a grieving child unable to move beyond, or let go of, the death of an imperial parent. This in itself inhibits the coming of age of a truly heteroglot notion of Britishness. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3022

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The application of Freud’s melancholia/mourning distinction to national identity — where the lost object (empire) is intangible and unacknowledged — is a paradigm-level idea about how nations process (or fail to process) loss.
• XREF: Connects to the reading on silence/deep listening around unacknowledged grief and the difficulty of naming what is lost, and to the idea of national unprocessed trauma.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘postcolonial melancholia’ via Gilroy’s Freudian distinction between mourning that reckons with loss and neurotic solipsism that cannot let go.