Whiteness, Displacement, and the Postimperial Imaginary in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out

This essay considers how Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964) reproduces the highly racialized (re)constructions of national and cultural identity taking place in Britain at mid-century. Resituating a novel most commonly discussed in terms of its stylistic Frenchness to its postimperial British context, I argue that Out’s formulations of displacement are tied to emergent myths of white victimhood and narratives of cultural decline following postwar migration to Britain from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Reading the novel’s narrative strategies through a paradigm of whiteness, I suggest that Out’s experimental form constitutes a distinctively postimperial aesthetic.