Recent years have seen a concern with reimagining Britain’s cultural and national identities through an eclectic array of genres and forms that share a renewed concern with notions of the commons, new regionalisms and ‘folk politics’. These approaches range from radical political essayism such as Alex Niven’s New Model Island (2019) to a specifically British interest in cultural-political forms of hauntology, and the resurgence of folk horror across different genres and media, including film, literature, painting and music. What unites these diverse texts and genres is their interest in reinterpreting the pre-industrial past of the commons. These approaches frequently assume a notably ‘post-British’ stance. This article explores the meanings of ‘folk’ in this context and examines recent examples of ‘folk cinema’ as a ‘post-British’ cultural form of thinking about the commons and their history. The texts and films discussed in this article contribute to a ‘commons imaginary’ and share an interest in the ambivalent political potential of ‘folk’ as a concept that gives form to the notion of the commons and the threats to it. What unites these folk-oriented narratives of the commons is a grappling with notions of modernity and rationality vis-à-vis residual pre-modern forms of community and thinking.
