Translating the intellectual in Britain: The Cenotaph yob and other representations of dissent

The media coverage of the 2010 British student protests has highlighted the centrality of pervasive discourses on the absence of a culture of dissent in Britain while reviving representations of the intellectual as estranged and alienated from Britishness. Reflections on British exceptionalism entail a selection of chosen pasts and idealized/demonized geographical 'elsewheres', which contrast the vision of law-abiding Britain with the insurrectional continent. In an attempt to comprehend the new forms of social protest, debates regarding student 'riots' invoked post-revolutionary tropes of identity and otherness in Britain: black-hooded foreigners were regarded as vectors of disorder linked with images of contagion, until a figure of the home-grown intellectual blended multilayered narratives on the nation, its aliens and dissenters.