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Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of 'postmodern' social norms with the European project's end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK's post-Thatcherite 'globalising' nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.

This paper analyzes how policy-relevant actors understand the causes and effects of labor immigration to Malaysia, the country that receives the highest number of migrant workers in Southeast Asia. Whereas most research on international migration governance has focused on governance system outputs, this paper adopts an actor-centered perspective to investigate how actors narratively construct labor migration dynamics in Malaysia and how they conceptualize the drivers and impacts of labor migration policies and practices. The empirical material comes from 41 in-depth interviews with government officials, policymakers, international and regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, employers' organizations, trade unions, and embassy representatives. The study found that Malaysia's migration governance system was perceived as "chaotic" due to the seemingly inconsistent, unclear "ad hoc" policy measures implemented, and that the governance system is perceived as "corrupt." Economic incentives were also seen as the primary driver of labor immigration, yet the main impact on Malaysian society was perceived as the spread of criminality, violence and disease, a narrative centered on migrant men. This paper argues that this discourse is problematic as it may drive types of policy measures that target migrant men.

AbstractNorth Sea oil discoveries introduced a qualitative divide that gave rise to at least the prospect of an economically viable Scottish independence, insofar as it made the "Scottish economy" a legitimate point of contestation on constitutional lines. In turn, this problematised the nature of minority nationalism in advanced, developed, post‐imperial capitalist regional economies. The research assesses how economic factors – most notably oil – materially affected the prospects of asserting power, and thus the possibilities for imagining collective agency as a national (i.e. Scottish) project. Oil helped shift "New Left" thinking away from assimilationist and modernising projects of assimilating regional consciousness into "national" projects, while also inspiring outright nationalists to define their own project in relation to the earlier phases of nationalism. The study thus contributes to recentring the study of Scotland, with a smaller emphasis on the local dimension and identities, as against the role of national actors in untangling relationships with wider geopolitical and geo‐economic forces. The claim is not simply that global forces formed the qualitative divide that made nationalist action possible; but also that these were conscious considerations of actors in the aftermath of North Sea discoveries.

ABSTRACT: William Faulkner shows the objective and subjective world in intimate dialogue throughout his fiction. His pattern of representing bodies in conversation with buildings through movement and perception is integral to his vision of embodied experience. This article demonstrates how Faulkner employs competing romantic and modernist architectures in service of a descriptive ontology and a new theory of architecture. In "Mirrors of Chartres Street," Faulkner offers a new mode of building that rejects the use of property or tools, heroizing the body itself as a means of building and dwelling.

Mao Dun's (茅盾) 1932 short story "Spring Silkworms" (春蚕), the first of a three-part series known as the Village Trilogy, is widely regarded as one of the author's most representative works. Given Mao Dun's leftist politics and commitment to critical realism, the story has generated debate over its depiction of the Chinese peasantry and the extent to which it condemns tradition in support of revolutionary progress. This article contends that the key to the ambiguity of the peasants' depiction lies in the fundamental questioning of what is human, which underlies the story's overall ideological framework. Through a close examination of the story and its 1933 film adaptation, the article aims to show how the silkworms act as a metaphor for the villagers themselves, who are dehumanized through their helplessness and alienated labor. By reading the human villagers as metaphorical worms, the article demonstrates how they are both exposed as a kind of valueless "bare life" and situated in a narrative pause in historical materialist time, which indicates a space for the potential fundamental reconceptualization of the human. Ultimately, the article hopes to push beyond didactic readings of the story's politics to reveal an ontological anxiety at its core.