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Article published In: Narrative Boundaries: Constitutional struggles in an age of polarization
Edited by Rodrigo Cordero and Raimundo Frei
[Journal of Language and Politics 23:5] 2024
► pp. 699–722

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Enemy narratives

How the official Brexit campaign “Vote Leave” narrated the boundaries of the British Nation

ORCiD logo with link | Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
Published online: 5 August 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24095.bon
Abstract
Within the fields of narratology, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, this article studies how “Vote Leave” – the “respectable” side of the pro-Brexit debate –, used storytelling to frame an exclusionary conception of the British nation. To do so, the article relies on a critical narrative analysis of the storytelling elements at the heart of a corpus of official documents from the 2016 campaign, and argues that those Brexit narratives were instrumental in the creation of a nativist conception of the British nation. The paper contributes to the rich literature on Brexit narratives by adopting an original approach focusing on what we call “enemy narratives” and on how this type of narratives helped construct a restrictive understanding of the British nation. The result will be correlated with the growing political polarization of post-Brexit British society and the emergence of what some researchers consider as a culture war
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Brexit storytelling and the discursive construction of the nation
  • 3.Methodology: A critical approach to narrative analysis
  • 4.Empirical analysis: Vote Leave’s narrative boundaries
  • 5.Discussion: The narrative boundaries of a nativist vision of the British nation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • Bibliography
References (80)
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