'British territory': Irvine Welsh in English and Japanese

This article takes the export of Irvine Welsh within the late 1990s context of Cool Britannia as a case study of how British cultural industries tend to neutralize the more nationalist tendencies of devolution outside of the UK. It places the current breakup of the union within a longer colonial and postcolonial history during which British identity has tended to be held together by its reproduction elsewhere, initially in the colonies. Irvine Welsh is especially important here since his context is also that of Europes most Enlightenment city, Edinburgh, a city behind many of the universalization tendencies of English literature and imperialism. Here I concentrate particularly on Welsh's novels Trainspotting and Marabour Stork Nightmares, and their translation into Japanese, and show that although Welsh grasps the sectarianism and imperialism within Britishness and its transmission through elite margins such as Edinburgh, the film version of Trainspotting, and translations of his work in general tend to re-adapt these threats back into an Enlightenment, multicultural Britishness.