ABSTRACT
This essay will address the cultural legacy of the Falklands War in the twentieth-first century through three narratives that revisit the events of 1982 through the lens of adolescent experience: Gregory Burke’s The Straits (2003), David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006), and Shane Meadow’s This Is England (2006). Contrary to claims that the Falklands War has become “enclosed” and “without consequence” (Barnes), the essay will begin by asserting the continuing significance of the conflict as a touchstone for nostalgic evocations and evaluations of British national identity in a post-imperial era characterised by globalised interchange and multi-national military operations. An important distinction will be drawn between examples of “restorative nostalgia” (Boym), which negatively assess the present against an idealised former state, and more progressive modes of “return” that foreground issues of legacy as a means of interrogating corresponding aspects of contemporary national discourse. The essay will concentrate upon the “coming of age” frameworks of its primary works, demonstrating how each binds the maturation of an adolescent character to the discourses of nationhood and legitimised violence that circulated during and after the summer of 1982. Ultimately, these liminal characters are read as an emblematic means of measuring the intensity of the war’s domestic impact, whilst retrospectively exploring its cultural legacy through the “soul–nation allegory” (Moretti) of the Bildungsroman. The analysis of the three works will recognise significant variations in their representations of legacy, separating Burke’s stark warning of generational inheritance from Mitchell’s confident maturation and Meadow’s ambivalent renunciation. In spite of these differences, the essay will conclude by unifying these works as investigations that reflect, and respond to, twenty-first-century anxieties about the fracturing and realignment of British national identity. In contrast to imaginative projections of an assured cultural pluralism, these works revisit Britain’s “last imperial war” to critically interrogate a more insular nationalist tradition that continues to shape domestic attitudes to social inclusion and shadow post-imperial discourses of national belonging.
