(Anti-)Globalization And Britishness:Emerging British Identities In Autumn

Ali Smith is commented to be the most potential Scottish writer,and readers call her the successor of Virginia Woolf.Smith carries a strong sense of social responsibility and dedicates to writing about the real life of marginal groups with magnificent imagined scenes,thus probing into their floating identity.In Autumn,which is published four months after the Brexit referendum,Smith continued her nonlinear narrating accounts and persistently combined the British modern society with luxurious imagination.She has penetratingly explored the British national identity against the background of Brexit.This paper aims to explore the hybridity of British national identity in the way of textual close-reading,along with the cultural analysis of cultural identity,globalization,hybridity and orientalism.This paper first attempts to analyze the connection between British national identity and the Brexit referendum and points out from the perspective of cultural identity that after Brexit,the Britons’ irrational behaviors of extreme nationalism parade and intensively watching historical TV program reflect Britons’ identity crisis,nostalgia to the British history and the opposition between Britain and Others.These behaviors,however,didn’t help the protagonist Elisabeth to reconstruct her national identity,and instead stimulate deeper anxiety and confusion.In Autumn,hybridity of British national culture is manifested in diverse reactions of the constituent states of Britain to Brexit and the immigrant influx.Under the influence of globalization,this paper further discusses the pluralization and fragmentation of British national culture,the ambivalence of the ethnic boundary and the boundary between realness and imagination,and the fragmentation of Elizabeth’s national identity because of her identification with her intimate friend,Daniel,a German immigrant.This paper concludes that in the overall declining Britain,Elizabeth tries to formulate her national identity marked with postmodernistic elements after she has internalized multiethnic culture in the country.