Description
New Elizabethanism characterised the period surrounding the mid-20th Century Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Drawing parallels with the 16th Century reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, the New Elizabethan mood promised to deliver the country from a winter of wartime crisis into a spring of hope, creativity and technological revolution. This paper uses the recent creation of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) as a window into the emotional resonance of New Elizabethanism in contemporary imaginaries of a post-Brexit Global Britain. Drawing on a wealth of parliamentary debates and reports about ARIA’s creation, it shows how modern and forward-looking proposals for reinvigorating Britain’s ‘global scientific superpower’ status are underwritten by nostalgia for an early imperial age, allegedly founded on individual brilliance and heroic exploration. In doing so, it challenges conventional understandings of nostalgia as simply melancholic and backward-looking, showing how the emotion also shapes political visions of a bright and hopeful future. However, the paper also argues that forward-looking nostalgias can have a dark side. This becomes apparent when we locate post-Brexit New Elizabethanism within an international and intellectual Anglofuturist project interested in racist and eugenicist methods of propelling 'white' nations forward. By exposing the networks, ideologies and emotions that underpin this broader Anglofuturist agenda, the paper contributes to growing field-wide calls to reckon with how colonially-rooted imaginaries of race continue to shape the theory and practice of international relations.
