My latest article entitled 'How to Read Paddington Bear: Liberalism and the Foreign Subject in A Bear Called Paddington' has just been published online through Early View with the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
In the article, I argue that Paddington’s identity and privileged position within UK popular culture raise questions with regards to the current politics of migration. To this end, I analyse Paddington's stories as vernacular theorisations of bordering practices and explore the challenges to migrant political subjectivity that arise within them. Although initially written in the context of migration into the UK in the late 1950s, I demonstrate how A Bear Called Paddington offers critical insight into the ambivalences regarding foreignness produced through the desires of limited interference and toleration in political liberalism with perceptions of danger based on cultural difference that remain important today.
I go on to suggest that Paddington draws critical attention to exclusionary bordering practices underpinning foreignness in liberal contexts. Within A Bear Called Paddington, Paddington is negatively portrayed in ways that foreground hygiene, poverty and education as key aspects of his migrant subjectivity. These representations resonate in bordering practices that represent and treat the foreigner as a socioeconomic threat, a harbinger of Malthusian demise, an eraser of cultural identity, and a resource drain.
At the same time, these representations help to shore up the perceived borders of the domestic and those said properly to inhabit its spaces by allowing for the articulation of an idealised self and community that is jeopardised and endangered. Foreignness can therefore be used as a means of shoring up liberal institutions and associated values such as tolerance. The presence of the foreigner makes possible the extension of particular gestures that are understood as magnanimous and generous. In turn, these gestures also contribute to feelings of ontological security by reinforcing a positive view of liberalism—and the universal liberal subject. That these gestures are predicated on the recipient sublimating other forms of identity while accepting the limits of a moral economy that constricts the exercise of agency and autonomy of suspect subjects is also evident in the narrative of A Bear Called Paddington. Paddington thus can thus draw attention to the myriad insecurities underpinning liberal bordering practices of inclusion as well as how foreigners have been ambivalently positioned within liberal theory as both the cause of and solution to political problems.
I then explain that Paddington illustrates how political theorising may take place in the vernacular spaces of popular culture. It may be true that representations and critiques in Paddington are well known and have been more rigorously presented elsewhere. But such a claim misses an important point: that stories featuring a beloved character in the UK negotiate these issues in the first place. Paddington is significant because the character contributes to the reproduction of the boundaries within which understandings of what it means to be a good host and a good foreigner in a liberal society are being contested.
I then conclude the article with the assessment that further research is required to establish how vernacular expressions of political sentiment in popular cultural artefacts may be shaping modes of activity more generally understood as ‘political’.
Byond the specific homage to Dorfman and Mattelart's classic How to Read Donald Duck, the article owes a great amount of debt to the work of David Campbell, Bonnie Honig, and Thomas McLaughlin as well as more recent scholarship on popular culture undertaken by my Newcastle colleagues Matt Davies--on work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer--and Nick Randall--on cinematic and televisual portrayals of British parliamentary politics.
Get in touch with me via my institutional email (I am readily found via google) if you are unable to get behind the paywall and would like a copy of the paper.
Photo credit: Walt Jabsco
