Postimperial melancholia and the English North–South divide: Reading the life stories of Northern women of colour in London

<p dir="ltr">The trope of the English North-South divide has come to frame a plethora of national crises in recent years, with the supposedly white working-class North understood as having been ‘left behind’ by London’s ‘metropolitan elite’. Bringing together geographies of England’s socio-spatial inequalities, emotional geographies, and postcolonial understandings of Englishness, I theorise the contemporary English North-South divide as a form of ‘splitting’, a psycho-spatial strategy born out of postimperial melancholia. Reading life stories recorded with women of colour from the North of England who are living in London through Avtar Brah’s conceptualisation of England as a ‘diaspora space’, this paper destabilises binarised imaginaries of North and South.</p>