ABSTRACT
In recent years, historians, social theorists and literary scholars have developed an impressive theoretical armoury with which to illuminate the question of how a national identity is formed and how it becomes distinguished from other national entities. Traditional discussions of racism, xenophobia and nationalism have now been complemented by notions of ‘Otherness and difference’, ‘boundary formation’ and ‘identity construction’. Though there are important differences in nuance between contemporary thinkers, since the publication of Anderson’s influential book, Imagined communities (1983), in a sense we are all ‘constructionists’ now in that it is difficult to imagine any contemporary scholar insisting on the biological determinacy of race, the immutability of national character or the primordiality of ethnicity (see Jackson and Penrose 1993). After providing a brief exegesis of some of the more recent theory, I use the case of expulsions and deportations from Britain to show how immigration policy was deployed, both in a metaphorical and more literal sense, to give shape and meaning to an emerging British national identity.
