How to Read Paddington Bear: Liberalism and the Foreign Subject inA Bear Called Paddington

Abstract

A Bear Called Paddington as a vernacular political text about bordering practices and foreignness. With the foreign subject in the UK positioned as both a cause of and a solution to politico-cultural problems, the Paddington stories illustrate how this ambivalence is deeply embedded within liberalism. It is argued that A Bear Called Paddington unpacks liberal conceptions of identity, migration and tolerance while drawing attention to specific negotiations of difference that render Paddington (and others like him) into precarious positions of insecurity. The article then illustrates how Paddington exemplifies the tensions caused by the presence of the foreigner in societies perceived to be liberal.

Did Perception of the Economy Affect Attitudes to Immigration at the 2010 British General Election?*

“…Alongside the main independent variables, the model controls for various predictors of hostility to immigration highlighted in the literature review. In relation to the literature on identity and culture and immigration (see Ivarsflaten, ; McLaren and Johnson, ; Grayson, ), the model controls for a respondent's ethnicity, class, age, sex, religion, educational qualification, and the newspaper he or she reads. Ethnicity is coded as nonwhite British (0) and white British (1).…”

“…If immigration were perceived to have contributed to the economic downturn, it might be perceived as a threat. As Grayson (:389) notes, “threats provide citizens with ontological security … about their own identity, their rightful position in the world and who (or what) poses a danger to them.” Immigration does not therefore simply generate rational responses devoid of feeling (Convoer and Feldman, :51). It also generates emotional responses that influence and shape political behavior (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKeun, ; Huddy et al., ; Brader, ; Valentino, Gregorowicz, and Groenendyk, ).…”

“…The identity‐based hypothesis proposes that economic perception is not the primary predictor of hostility to immigration, but that such hostility arises from discomfort and unease at threats to national identity and social culture. Grayson (:382–83) argues that the anxieties linked to perceptions of transformations in culture and identity make more restrictive immigration policies politically feasible. Ford and Goodwin (:15) argue that those who engage with the media that espouse anti‐immigration views are more likely to be hostile to immigration, echoing earlier findings by Arzheimer () and Ivarsflaten () regarding the relationship between reading the anti‐immigrant media and European extreme‐right parties.…”

Who’s afraid of the ecological apocalypse? Climate change and the production of the ethical subject

“…Informed by the recent turn in Politics and IR towards an engagement with the aesthetic and cultural as powerful sites for the establishment and (re)production of claims about and practices of ethics in world politics (Bleiker, 2001;Brassett, 2009;Croft, 2006;Grayson, 2012;Weldes, 2003), the article analyses the (re)production of the ethical subject in ecological apocalypse narratives across seemingly divergent sites. The analysis draws from a range of cultural, academic and 'elite' narratives of the problem of climate change, 2 with a focus on the United Kingdom and the United States, 3 and reads these alongside calls for ethical motivation to interrogate the cultural production of climate ethics.…”

“…One response to this perceived inertia, amongst activists, politicians, and liberal political theorists, is to turn to ethics to provide a motivational 'push' which obligates engagement with what might otherwise be thought of as temporally and spatially distant consequences of climate change, and which proposes the means and method of such engagement (Caney, 2006;Jamieson, Informed by the recent turn in Politics and IR towards an engagement with the aesthetic and cultural as powerful sites for the establishment and (re)production of claims about and practices of ethics in world politics (Bleiker 2001;Brassett, 2009;Croft, 2006;Grayson 2012;Weldes, 2003), the article analyses the (re)production of the ethical subject in ecological apocalypse narratives across seemingly divergent sites. The analysis draws from a range of cultural, academic and 'elite' narratives of the problem of climate change, 2 with a focus on the UK and US, 3 and reads these alongside calls for ethical motivation to interrogate the cultural production of climate ethics.…”