Border Anxieties and The Politics of BrexLit

This article discusses a recent genre of Brexlit – literary works that have anticipated or directly responded to the Brexit referendum in 2016 – and its contribution to the cartography of political writing in Europe. The events preceding and following the Brexit vote witnessed a flourishing cultural and literary activity. What is now discussed under the category of ‘Brexlit’ encompasses a growing thematic and generic richness - state-of-the-nation novels, crime and thrillers, dystopian narratives, poetry, drama and essays. Focusing on a selection of Brexit poetry that have so far not received much critical attention, and novels and non-fiction that have tended to identify with the Remain position, I explore how these texts capture the zeitgeist of Brexit. I analyse the anxieties surrounding post-2004 EU migration and the tensions between the discourses of Euroscepticism and Europhilia, placing these works in the context of wider and unresolved debates about the nation’s imperial legacy. I conclude by offering my own contribution to the genre with a poem entitled ‘Communist Balcony’ that unsettles the politics of borders through an oppositional discourse centring the ‘Eastern European’ migrant experience.