Post-imperial anxieties span material competition and injured national pride.

Evidence

The anxieties following the fading of empire and its demographic effects assumed many faces and forces only now manifesting as visibly in other European countries: intensified competition for working-class work; bourgeois disdain for having to struggle for student and faculty positions in elite universities once the presumed privilege of legacies; the flamboyance of foreign capital fueling real estate inflation; the fracturing of a presumptuously homogeneous national culture; the indignity and inconvenience of sometime, if repetitive, urban street riots; the panic around rising crime rates perceived as coterminous, correlated, and at worst causally identified with rising immigration presence and gang formation; the embarrassing losses to former colonial cricket and football teams; and the worries – predicated for the most part on a longer set of experiences – about explosive urban terrorism traced to a too liberal open-door policy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 916

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s ‘loss of the fantasy of omnipotence’ and the general post-imperial melancholia literature; also echoes the colonial-cricket losses motif from standard accounts of British decline.