Chapter 5
In: Nationalism and the Postcolonial
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Abstract
This chapter analyses two song lyrics by PJ Harvey and Kate Tempest. Both are read as ‘Condition of England’ texts, and more specifically as texts that negotiate the condition of Englishness within the cultural environment prior to Brexit. I argue that both songs sense a postcolonial melancholia. Each work meets this condition critically, but while Kate Tempest seeks alternative modes of national being, PJ Harvey’s song also provides a (reluctant) example of its pathology. These responses are contextualised within a specific tendency of British popular music to perform its Englishness in a manner that excludes the postcolonial from national identity, and they are considered in relation to the ‘Condition of England’ genre’s wide-spread dissociation of imperialism and colonialism from the England it portrays. Presenting themselves as critiques of the current national moment, the two songs stress the imperial dimensions of the nation and thus refute the notion that Englishness exists in isolation from the (post)colonial. PJ Harvey, however, does not offer a vision of Englishness beyond the sanctuary of the pastoral, which her lyrics reject and long for at the same time, and she thus excludes from the imaginary topography of Englishness those urban, postcolonial spaces that Kate Tempest deliberately attends.