Identity and consensus in 1951 Festival of Britain & Unboxed Festival 2022

This paper, by Dr Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, will examine and compare aspects of the representation of British identities both in the Festival of Britain and Unboxed – identities understood in relationship to the British territory itself as well in their relationship to (former) colonised countries and the European continent. Both projects were conceived by governments seeking to make bold political statements in moments of national crisis and renewal: the Labour government’s post-war reconstruction in the case of the Festival of Britain and the Conservative driven exit from the European Union in the case of Unboxed. Even as the ideological projects underpinning these temporally distanced governments might be seen as fundamentally opposed – the first popularly characterised by the expansion of social democratic welfare and state ownership and the second by an ongoing encroachment of private interests in formerly nationalised domains such as healthcare and education – many aspects of both projects’ negotiation of British identities appear surprisingly similar.

Despite very different approaches to the festival model in relationship to the organisation of exhibits and events, both projects are characterised in the first instance by the necessity of political compromise regarding the achievements they originally were understood to champion, here Labour’s achievements in general and the Conservative exit from the European Union in particular. However it is more specifically in how their evocations of Britain’s place in the world (and cosmos!), imperial history and British racialised identities are evoked which renders both projects not only surprisingly adjacent in substance but also perhaps more broadly indicative of how questions of race and empire can be consensually harnessed in large cultural undertakings by disparate British governments. I will be drawing on archives and critical work on the festival of Britain by Becky Conekin and Richard Hornsey as well as recent and less recent work on race, identity, consensus and antiracism in British cultural and literary studies. This will help me to illuminate how both festivals present participants with curated silences and flattened conceptions of diversity deeply enmeshed with discourses on identity characteristic of certain forms of liberal consensus at a broader social level of which these silences and flattened conceptions of identities also form an integral part.