Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, two subfields of research have emerged, one trying to answer whether Brexit was a case of colonial nostalgia, the other examining how literature has responded to Brexit: see, for example, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (2019); the contributions in Robert Eaglestone, ed., Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses (2018); Robert Saunders, “Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the Myth of Imperial Nostalgia,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 6 (2020): 1140–74; the contributions in Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch, eds, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (2019). The anthology Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains, edited by Caroline Koegler, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, and Marlena Tronicke, sits at the intersection of these two subfields. Previously published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (56, no. 5 [2020]), the collection consists of nine relatively brief and generally well-written chapters, each analyzing a few cultural works, and an introduction that reads Brexit as a case of “narcissistic nationalism” (1–3). Koegler, Malreddy, and Tronicke avoided engaging in debate on what may or may not have motivated voters or politicians to opt for leaving the European Union. Instead, the contributions as a whole ask not whether but how any colonial dimensions of Brexit have manifested themselves in cultural products and how postcolonial literature has responded to the Brexit moment. In this, the contributors argue for a wider Brexit moment, suggesting as John McLeod does, that postcolonial literature held warning signs of the rupture to come long before David Cameron announced his decision to hold a referendum, or, as Tronicke does, that Brexit theater is much older than Brexit.

This expansive sense of the object of study occasionally threatens to undermine the focus of the volume. If scholars arguing that Brexit was a case of colonial nostalgia have at times been at pains to find substantial evidence of such nostalgia, and have risked overstating their case, many authors in this volume seem at pains to persuade their readers that what they are analyzing is in fact Brexit literature. Whether it is McLeod backdating Brexit literature to the early 2000s, Ronald Cummings reading echoes of Brexit into the Barbadian Canadian author Austin Clarke's 1980 memoir, or Lindsay Moore searching for the “unconscious” (37) connections between Brexit and the Israel/Palestine conflict in contemporary literature, they each propose their own expansion of what we might reasonably call Brexit literature. As a reader, you might be forgiven for occasionally wondering where, if anywhere, the limits for this genre might lie. The “colonial remains” of the title are found in as diverse sites as representations of “Eastern Europeans” (Vedrana Veličković, 64), intertextual references to Homer, Chaucer, and Kipling (Jan Rupp); and portrayals of the rural-urban divide (Birte Heidemann). While most of the contributors argue convincingly for the relevance of a postcolonial lens for their analysis, the sum of the parts is somewhat eclectic.

However, this broadening of the scope of analysis is also the strength of this collection—and of literary criticism more generally: the contributors provide persuasive arguments for the connections that each of them establishes between Brexit and their particular works of choice. Reading between the lines of both the cultural production and Brexit, they peel back the layers of the contemporary moment. Thus, Shazia Sadaf compellingly demonstrates how Pakistani Mohsin Hamid's 2017 science fiction novel Exit West connects to Brexit through its thematization of borders, which are all but eliminated in the world of the novel through portals that allow migrants to travel effortlessly between locales. She argues that Hamid is using speculative fiction to try to counter the failure of imagination that causes cultures to look for past greatness by instead imagining a different and more progressive future. Hamid, she suggests, offers an optimistic view that blurs the boundaries insisted upon by the nativist Brexit call to take back control of the borders. Is this novel about Brexit? Not explicitly, but it is also not clear that it is not about Brexit.

Paul Gilroy's 2005 Postcolonial Melancholia is a touchstone for many of the contributors. By now, Gilroy's work has become an obligatory reference point for much analysis of the specters of colonialism haunting Brexit, and with good reason. His portrayal of an unfinished imperial business and the psychological and cultural reactions it continues to produce allows for subtlety in the examination of Brexit. Exploring the colonial residue of the Brexit moment does not need to be limited to looking for the smoking gun of Brexiteers stating that they want to bring back the empire or Leave voters scoring high on YouGov polls on imperial pride. With Gilroy, the authors demonstrate that the legacies of empire inform literature, film, and theater in the age of Brexit. In some cases, as demonstrated by Clelia Clini's excellent analysis of the “Raj Nostalgia 2.0” of Stephen Frears's 2017 Victoria and Abdul (123), such works repeat mythologies of imperial greatness and fantasies of subjugation by consent. In others, they expose and challenge the racist underside of such mythologies, document their legacies in the contemporary treatment of nonwhite Britons old and new, and envision a different way of living together. The contributors argue that the effects of colonialism on British racial attitudes long outlived the empire, and that these attitudes in turn were central in fostering the divisions that led to Brexit. With this expansive understanding of the wider Brexit moment and its cultural roots, Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains offers a welcome literary perspective on the legacies of empire.