Postimperial melancholia and the English North-South divide: reading the life stories of Northern women of colour in London

The trope of the English North-South divide has come to frame a plethora of national crises in recent years, with the supposedly white working-class North understood as having been ‘left behind’ by London’s ‘metropolitan elite’. Bringing together geographies of England’s socio-spatial inequalities, emotional geographies, and postcolonial understandings of Englishness, this paper theorises the contemporary English North-South divide as a form of ‘splitting’, a psycho-spatial strategy born out of postimperial melancholia. In an attempt to contain the contradictory impulses towards helplessness and omnipotence produced through Britain’s former global supremacy and its imperial decline, dominant imaginaries of England separate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and locate them in either the North or London, with implications for the distribution of material and cultural resources within the nation. Reading life stories recorded with women of colour from the North of England who are living in London through Avtar Brah’s conceptualisation of England as a ‘diaspora space’, this paper destabilises binarised imaginaries of North and South. Contributing to geographies of race, class and nation, this paper demonstrates that, through an attentiveness to individual biographies, identities and experiences, the binaries of migrant and native, past and future, North and South, are rendered untenable.