Myths and Sanctioned Ignorance in British Immigration Discourse

In this book, Samuel Bennett looks at the British national myths regarding the UK's relationship with other countries and its former colonies. He argues that the construction of these myths to legitimise Britain's self-image has racialized, silenced, and erased the migrant "Other"--and, by extension, British ethnic minorities. Drawing upon critical discourse studies and integrating decolonial and postcolonial theories, Bennett offers an in-depth, methodologically rigourous analysis of five central myths of UK immigration discourse. Further, he shows how the myths the UK tells itself are at once stable, deployed in different contexts, and historically rooted.