Resistance and the City : Negotiating Urban Identities: Race, Class, and Gender [1 ed.] 9789004369313, 9789004369290

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Resistance and the City

Spatial Practices An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature

General Editors Christoph Ehland (Universität Paderborn) Chris Thurgar-Dawson (Teesside University) Editorial Board Christine Berberich Jonathan Bordo Catrin Gersdorf Peter Merriman Ralph Pordzik Christoph Singer Merle Tönnies Cornelia Wächter Founding Editors Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

volume 28

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/spat

Resistance and the City Negotiating Urban Identities: Race, Class, and Gender Edited by

Christoph Ehland Pascal Fischer

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: photography by Christoph Ehland. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018022255

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1871-689X isbn 978-90-04-36929-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36931-3 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii General Introduction 1 Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer Introduction: Negotiating Urban Space 11 Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer

Part 1 Race and Ethnicity 1 Black Citizens – British Spaces: Struggles in the 1970s and 1980s and Cinematic Representations 19 Ingrid von Rosenberg 2 Resisting Topographies: Immigration, Space and the City in Contemporary British Film 34 Ralf Schneider 3 Heterotopias as Spaces of Resistance in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) 50 Katrin Röder 4 Changing Uses of the City in Contemporary Black British Novels 66 Merle Tönnies and Anna Lienen

Part 2 Social Class 5 “Poor is Cool”: The Working-Classes as Myth in Pulp’s “Common People” 85 Christoph Singer 6 Chavs: The Clash of Social Classes in Urban Britain 97 Frank Erik Pointner

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The Other Dublin: Homelessness, Abject Comedy and Challenges to the Urban Order in Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul (2004) 112 Mark Schmitt

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In the Ghetto: Inequality, Riots and Resistance in London-Based Science Fiction of the Twenty-First Century 130 Barbara Korte

Part 3 Gender and Sexuality 9

‘Lost to the Streets’: Violence, Space and Gender in Urban Crime Fiction 151 Gill Plain

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The Urban Residential Balcony as Interstitial Site 168 Sabine H. Smith

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Muslims against Gays? Faith, Sexuality, Resistance and London’s East End 185 Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz

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Scenic Subversions: On Bruce LaBruce’s Re-queering of That Cold Day in the Park 201 Ger Zielinski

Index 217

Acknowledgements This volume of essays has long been in the making. The editors are therefore particularly grateful to the contributors for their patience and their collaborative spirit. Furthermore, we want to express our gratitude to the many diligent minds and hands in Bamberg and Paderborn that have helped in the process of editing this book. Special thanks go to our team of research students who dedicated their time and effort to proofreading and preparing the typescript: Yvonne Jende, Henry Kaup and Andreas Schwengel. Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer

Notes on Contributors Christoph Ehland is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn in Germany. Pascal Fischer is Professor of English and American Cultural Studies at the University of Bamberg in Germany. Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg in Germany. Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Anna Lienen is Lecturer at the Department of English at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. Frank Erik Pointner is Professor of English Literature at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Gill Plain is Professor of English Literature at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Ingrid von Rosenberg Until her retirement in 2004, Ingrid von Rosenberg PhD lectured as Professor for Great Britain Studies at Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Katrin Röder is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam in Germany. She holds a PhD from the HumboldtUniversity of Berlin. Mark Schmitt is Postdoctoral Stuart Hall Fellow at the Department of English and American Studies at the Technical University Dortmund in Germany.

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Ralf Schneider is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bielefeld is Germany. Christoph Singer teaches British Literature at the University of Paderborn in Germany. He holds a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Paderborn ­University in Germany. Sabine H. Smith is Professor of German at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, United States of America. Merle Tönnies is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn in Germany. Ger Zielinski is Research Associate at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in Art History and Communication Studies from McGill University in Quebec, Canada.

General Introduction Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer Spaces of agglomeration have always been spaces of conflict. In his report about a journey from London to Birmingham in 1843, the German traveller Johann Georg Kohl notes with apparent disappointment: “I arrived a little too late for the riot-season, for September had already begun, and the season for disturbances seems invariably fixed for July.” (Kohl 1844: 2–3) The riots are registered almost in passing as if they were part of the natural order – or rather disorder – of urban space. Such a remark may sound peculiar in a narrative that is largely a travelogue of a tour through the provinces of England, Wales and Scotland and in which the author’s calls at country houses and gardens alternate with his visits to the new industrial cities in central and northern England. One might argue that Kohl’s apparent disappointment at having missed the ‘seasonal’ uprisings in Birmingham displays an unsavoury sensationalism on the part of the traveller. However, as the text unfolds it becomes clear that this disappointment is an expression of the author’s emotional aloofness from the places he visits and the things he experiences. Kohl travels through a country that has to come to terms with the experience of the violent clashes between the police forces and the protesters of the Chartist movement. In the places he visits, he observes not only that the traces of these clashes are still discernible in burnt-out houses and broken windows but also how the authorities are struggling to maintain a precarious civic order. With regard to this, the knowledge of the ‘riots’ represents the steady background noise which frequently challenges the typically picturesque descriptive nature of the generic travelogue. In consequence, the descriptions of the beauty of the country estates and gardens he visits is curiously out of touch with and overshadowed by his accounts of the conditions of life in the growing industrial agglomerations. Kohl’s journey reveals a society in transformation. As he ventures into the heartlands of the industrial revolution, he travels deep into the territory that grows new forms of resistance. Visiting some of the hotspots of the Chartists’ protests, Kohl “inquire[s] into all the particulars of this affair, and [sees] where it occurred” (Kohl 1844: 23). In doing so, however, it seems that he frequently finds it difficult to explain and accommodate the heterogeneous impressions of his journey. Although he strongly disapproves of the violence of the protests and speaks disparagingly of “the conspiracies” (20) of the Chartists, condemning their display of “hatred” (23), at other times he seems to entertain some sympathy for the “poor,

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hungry, misguided multitudes” (24) of impoverished weavers, colliers and pottery workers. In fact, in his matter-of-fact depiction of the living conditions in the urban centres he implicitly provides an explanation, if not a justification, of the protests: […] then politics crept in among them, and combinations and ­conspiracies began to be formed, even as among the cotton spinners of Lancashire, the woollen weavers of Yorkshire, the cutlers of Sheffield, the hardwaremakers of Birmingham, and the colliers of Newcastle, as, in that, among all the work-men of England, who are packed together in certain districts as closely as bees in hives. (20) Despite the fact that he largely tends to refrain from judging what he sees, his detached position as a traveller allows him – intentionally or u ­ nintentionally – to discern the contradictions and conflicts that characterise the urban condition in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere. His aloofness thus becomes the essential prerequisite for the insights his account can offer his readers. In his report of the industrial cities, he is as much interested in the factories and machinery as in the living conditions in which the less fortunate of the huddled masses are confined: the wonder at the advance of the English industrial manufacturers is balanced by the depiction of the social, aesthetic and environmental conditions under which the working classes have to live. When he states that “[t]he colliers are not more famed in England for their subordination than for the hardness of their work, which equals in severity any labour assigned to slaves in other countries” (80) it remains for the readers to draw their own conclusions from this. Seen from a different angle, the author’s apparent unease with the conditions and contradictions he is confronted with on his journey hints at a more abstract problem. A text such as Kohl’s travelogue vividly illustrates Henri ­Lefebvre’s idea of “contradictory space” (Lefebvre 2008: 292–321). In Lefebvre’s influential book, La production de l’espace (1974), this particular notion aims to accommodate in the phenomenology of socially produced space the fact that in any conceptualisation of space there is a tendency to homogenise into a unifying socio-political compromise the conflicts, the “scattered fragments” (308) of which human space inevitably consists. In terms of spatial practices this means that the hegemonic domination of a space by a particular group also translates into a hegemony of representation. Kohl’s travelogue exposes these processes by which the fragmented nature of modern industrial society, that is its inherent and inevitable conflicts and contradictions, are contained and controlled by a “legitimising ideology” (308) which is prone to brand these as

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‘riots’ and ‘disturbances’ and treats them as criminal. In this particular context it is indicative that in Kohl’s account visits to factories and industrial installations stand side by side with visits to workhouses and prisons. Although his interest is directed at the modern improvements to the English penal system, these visits inevitably showcase the procedures of containment: wherever Kohl visits a prison during his journey he finds the institution crowded “on account of the late disturbances” (Kohl 1844: 97). The criminalisation of urban protest and unrest is, in Lefebvre’s words, part of a practice “[i]mplying a ‘logic’ which misrepresents it and masks its contradictions” (Lefebvre 2008: 308). Calling forms of resistance ‘disturbances’, ‘tumult’, ‘riots’ or even ‘revolt’ is part of the politics of representation which produce the spaces human society inhabits. It is part of what Lefebvre has come to call the “ideological garb” which “robs reality of meaning” (317) by integrating it into an abstract conceptualisation of space. With regard to this, even belittlement becomes a strategy of linguistic containment, for example when Kohl informs his readers that “the strikes and riots of the colliers […] are of such frequent occurrence, that they have come to be designated by a provincial expression, ‘coalyshangie’” (84). Kohl’s text brings his readers to a decisive moment in the history of the modern city, when new forms of urban organisation came into being and old patterns of life in the city disappeared and, what is more, fostered or rather necessitated novel forms of resistance. This does not turn this conservative traveller into a harbinger of deeper truth and social reform, but Kohl’s ­flâneuresque detachment allows him to document the reality of the industrial cities without immediately being able to envelope its contradictions in the appropriate nomenclature. In distinction to his compatriot Friedrich Engels, with whom Kohl would have coincided in Manchester during his stay, he lacks any political agenda and involvement; although he does take account of the urban situation he rarely offers alternative rationalisations of it. Nevertheless, Kohl is a paradigmatic witness of the social structures and institutions which have come into being in order to contain and control the forces of resistance inherent in the new social reality of industrial urban space. Resistance reveals the fissures in the dominant ideology and marks the moment when the established discourse struggles to accommodate smoothly the heterogeneous and polymorphic fabric of urban societies. The same paradigmatic struggle for the “vestments” (ibid.) of urban resistance can be observed with regard to more recent examples of urban unrest. With regard to this, Kohl’s travelogue is interesting not only for its historical perspective but also because its observation of urban unrest foreshadows the frantic search for explanations after the 2011 riot in London. If one compares this historical example with the experiences of the present, there exist obvious

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parallels as well as differences. What both cases make clear, however, is that the city and the phenomenon of urban resistance remain significant analytical challenges. Turning to the 2011 events in London, one may note that the debate is far from being settled. At the time, the events immediately elicited bewildered reactions and prompted a feverish search for explanations within the medial and political spheres (cf. Kennedy 2011; Stanley 2011; Žižek 2011; Bauman 2011). When recently the chief of London’s police complained about the lack of sufficient funding for his force, he did so by warning politicians that the “police would struggle to deal with [a] repeat of 2011 riots” (Grierson 2017). From the perspective of Dave Thompson, chief constable of West Midlands police, the argument is understandable but also reveals a rather single-minded rationalisation of the 2011 events as “riots” by the authorities. Burned houses, smashed windows and street blockades seem to justify exactly this kind of linguistic ­accommodation and – following from this – calls for the appropriate answer of the executive branch: more police, more control and more surveillance. Ignoring their political exploitation, the events of 2011 remain contested territory of intellectual debate. At the time Slavoj Žižek accepted the term “riots” but voiced concern over the desultoriness of recent forms of urban resistance. In his much-quoted article in the London Review of Books he argues that the “rioters themselves do not deliver a message” (Žižek 2011). Despite this, he maintains that their violence nonetheless expresses “a deeper unease”, only immediately to ask, “but of what kind?” Like the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Žižek discerns in the protests a postmodern form of Marx’s class struggle in a consumer society. Quite pessimistically, however, he consents, “[i]t is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force” (Žižek 2011). Or, as Bauman put it: “These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers” (Bauman 2011). Both, Žižek and Bauman accept the destructive forces as part of a systemic deadlock: “Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of the realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of meaningless outburst.” (Žižek 2011) Violence and destruction are seen as the irrational expression of the discontent and disillusionment of city ­dwellers. One cannot avoid the impression that both seem to miss a ‘deserving’ and politically organised proletariat rather than the petty street kids of 2011, who seize the opportunity provided by the chaos of urban disturbances of stealing flat-screen tvs and the latest PlayStations. The painful memory of 2011 was revived during the summer of 2017 when the death of Rashan Charles in police custody sparked immediate protests from the black community in northeast London. In this context, Franklyn Addo urged the readers of the Guardian, “[d]on’t call them riots” (Addo 2017)

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because this would distort the real causes of the unrest. Addo’s observations draw a connection with the events of 2011 and point to the very processes of signification by which “the legitimacy of cause” (ibid.) was pushed aside by sensationalist media coverage. Taking the same line London writer Chimene Suleyman complains how the social protest inherent in the disturbances has since been “erased from this narrative” (Suleyman 2017), sharing Addo’s view that “[m]edia outlets were quick to caricature the disturbances in Dalston as a ‘riot’” (Addo 2017). According to these critical voices, the effect of such distortion or rather distraction is felt to this day and contributes to cement the status quo in London. What is branded as a ‘riot’ should, in fact, be considered from a more neutral standpoint as the moment in which the fragmented and conflicting reality of urban existence breaks most radically through the homogeneous and homogenising veneer of a rational order. Even if the debates on the causes and nature of the 2011 events are inconclusive and perhaps unsatisfactory, they are part of the coming to terms with the traumatic events and disclose what in essence is a struggle over signification. In fact, this recent upsurge of a “defiant urban culture” – from the ‘­London riots’ to the Occupy movement – primarily gives proof of the necessity of tracing the cultural resonance of these and similar incidents in the framework of a phenomenology of the city beyond feuilletonistic outpourings and political knee-jerk reactions. All this contributes to our conviction that it is about time to investigate urban environs from the perspective of their conflicts and contradictions. Long before Georg Simmel described the set of problems resulting from life in the big cities with new urgency and speculated how the metropolitan type of man “creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruptions with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu ­threaten it,” (Simmel 2010: 104) literature and philosophy had been concerned with the frictions of urban life. If seen as inherent in the modern city, resistance o­ ffers a meaningful vantage point from which the fabric, textures and stratifications of the city can be accessed. It is the aim of Resistance and the City to study the question of resistance in urban space from both a cultural and a literary perspective. While city air may provide liberty and opportunity for many, dense human agglomerations inevitably establish a normative context that orders and guards human life. The strictures thus imposed frequently provoke resistance. Even where the urban space merely appears as the stage for conflicts, outbursts of frustration are more often than not directed against its representatives, buildings and symbols. These antagonisms and strains are not ­exclusively of a destructive nature, but have also inspired creative activity at the level of popular culture. Tensions become perceptible along the fault lines

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of individuals and social groups. The spatial practices of the urban population, from demonstrations to street art, from graffiti to civic unrest, serve to renegotiate identities and redefine urban space according to such fundamental categories as race, class, and gender. Since spatial research in literary and cultural studies has for quite some time concentrated on the perceptive strategies of the urban environment, it is about time to give close consideration to the tensions occurring in the ­social production of space (cf. Lefebvre). There is a reciprocal relationship between s­ ubject and space; city-dwellers and the city mutually influence and shape each ­other. With regard to socially produced space, the city represents a particularly complex phenomenon to study because in urban conglomerations countless ­spatial practices concur, meet, overlap but also contradict each ­other. Resistance is thus a spatial practice that derives from and is directed at the very t­exture of urban space. What is more, it is a practice – in whatever form it occurs – that challenges the status quo and is in its ideal form utopian. Cultural and literary studies have for a long time been concerned with alternative visions of the world. It should, however, not be the purpose of cultural studies discussions to understand “resistance” in the framework of restrictive binary models, but rather as a factor in a network of actors. By focussing on the multiple manifestations of resistance in the city, these collections of essays consciously aims at placing dissenting sentiment and contrary action next to an affirmative practice of the production of (urban) spaces, because it is only in the subversion of established cultural spaces, so the argument goes, that their topography becomes visible as a wide-ranging and continuously transforming discourse. The articles examine this alternative encounter with the urban, which, for instance, becomes apparent in the self-conscious appropriation of the city by countercultural movements or even in open militant resistance. Research in literary and cultural studies has fostered productive insights into urban spaces. Regularly, it has put an emphasis on the question of how the ­social and material environment of the metropolis proved constitutive to the formation of urban identities which are characteristic of modernity. ­Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and the interpretation of his poetry by Walter Benjamin, the ideal embodiment of this urban modernity was identified in the person of the flâneur, who perceives the city with detached irony while strolling its streets. In his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman explains how strongly the experience of modernity in the wake of Baudelaire has become associated with the attraction and repulsion of the city. Within this research paradigm, the Paris of the nineteenth century is regarded as the epitome of the modern metropolis. Very characteristically of this approach,

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Christopher Prendergast’s Paris and the Nineteenth Century (1992), a study that connects literary analysis with art criticism, highlights the perspective of the urban stroller. The contributions in Keith Tester’s volume The Flâneur (1994) also focus on Baudelaire and Benjamin. Even though the emphasis shifted to the female viewpoint at the end of the 1990s and the flâneuse attracted considerable attention (Bowlby 1997, Chap. 3; Parsons 2000), the most important aspect remained the optical perception of the city. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the perspective on the city has been opened up to new approaches in literary studies, cultural studies, the history of ideas (intellectual history), and neighbouring disciplines. A ­series of studies has gone beyond the flâneur’s experience of the nineteenth-­century metropolis. For example, Romanticists have extended the question of the experience and perception of urban spaces into their period, as James K. ­Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin did in their collection Romantic Metropolis: The ­Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (2005), or as in the special edition of Romanticism 14.2 (2008) or in Larry H. Peer’s book Romanticism and the City (2011). While Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart’s Restless Cities (2010) still shows the importance of the Benjaminian tradition, this collection of essays at the same time attests to the diversification and vibrancy of the research field. Explicitly positioning itself in opposition to the scholarly concentration on the flâneur and this particular perception of the city, Matthew Taunton’s Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (2009) argues that “the home should be placed at the centre of a new understanding of metropolitan life” (1) and thus aims to move the attention from communal, public spaces to private and domestic ones. Recently, the privileged perspective of the intellectual who observes the city from a detached position has gradually been replaced by the viewpoint and experience of the marginalised. In this context one can note a resurgent interest in urban resistance groups such as the Occupy Movement. In Occupy: Räume des Protests (2012), Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer describe the processes by which urban spaces become charged with political energy. A ­variety of recent publications, such as Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (2016), edited by Nelida Fuccaro or Tali Hatuka’s book Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv: Revisioning Moments (2010), further stress the topicality of the phenomenon of violent protest in the urban context. This renewed urgency of investigating the relationship between resistance and the city comes as the notion of “thick space” begins to replace the idea of d­ ensity in urban studies (cf. Brantz, Disko and Wagner-Kyora 2012: 15f.). Conceiving urban spaces as “thick spaces” signals a shift of focus which emphasises not only “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures […] which

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are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit” (Geertz 1973: 10) in the reading of the city but also the need to come to terms with the socio-spatial dynamics intrinsic in any urban spatial phenomenon. An approach that helps to reconcile the Benjaminian approach with ­current trends in reading the city is the idea of “threshold experiences” (cf. ­Nuselovici, Ponzi and Vighi 2014). This particular opening towards and awareness of the resisting element in urban society, furthers our understanding of urban ­phenomenology. In The Arcades Project Benjamin observes the internal differentiation of urban space across which the flâneur constantly moves. He ­recognises the manifold divisions of the city, “those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits” (Benjamin 1999: 88). However, r­ ather than accepting these as clear-cut binary oppositions of an inside/outside ­division he reads these lines as opening up to threshold zones, spaces of transformation rather than borders of separation: “As thresholds, the boundary stretches across streets” (ibid.). For the current discussion it is not necessary to adopt the perceptive imperative of Benjamin’s flâneur with its emphasis on the individual “threshold experience” deriving from this “step into the void – as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs” (ibid.). The thresholds which characterise modern urban society represent zones, as Nuselovici, Ponzi and Vighi have recently shown, “beyond the traditional dialectics of inclusion and exclusion” (Nuselovici, Ponzi and Vighi 2014: ix). They are in the best sense of the term a contact zone “where transformations ­challenge the fixity of meanings” (viii-ix). Tensions erupt in these transformative zones of the city. The difficulties in coming to terms with them, in reading them, derives from the very fact that our conventional demarcations frequently fail to represent adequately the multi-layered nature and oscillating polysemy of urban spaces. With regard to the general bewilderment that followed the 2011 events in London, the concept of the threshold may further elucidate Žižek’s insinuation that the inexplicable conflicts of the postmodern city do not originate in the struggle “­between ­different parts of society; it is at its most radical, the conflict between ­society and society” (Žižek 2011). Žižek calls into question the applicability of the ­traditional Marxist assumptions about the conflict between the classes in a situation where such binary oppositions seem absent. Cities consist of such threshold zones in which difference is negotiated; frequently, however, we ­witness the processes of negotiation without being able to discern the differentiations that either underlie or spring from them. If in a globalised world the idea of borders, demarcations or frontiers sounds particularly out-of-date – despite its renaissance in the various ­populist

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­ ovements worldwide – resistance occurs in the threshold zones of urban m ­societies, in these claimed and re-claimable spaces that negotiate urban life: Wherever we find conflicts, contradictions, and aporias, we know that we need to rethink the hermeneutic categories that presuppose a sharp opposition between internal and external, or inclusion and exclusion, which now do not hold anymore. nuselovici, ponzi and vighi 2014: ix.

Looking at resistance and the city in conjunction is therefore a hermeneutic enterprise which will add to our understanding of the socio-spatial dynamic that has produced in the past and that still produces the cities we live in. Works Cited and Further Reading Addo, Franklyn. “Don’t call them riots.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 30 July 2017. Web. 10 Oct. 2017. Bauman, Zygmunt. “The London Riots – On Consumerism Coming Home to Roost.” Social Europe.eu. Social Europe. 9 August 2011. Web. Beaumont, Matthew, and Gregory Dart, eds. Restless Cities. London: Verso, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, ma: Harvard up, 1999. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Bloom, Clive. Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bloom, Clive. Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital. Palgrave Macmillan 2012. Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh up, 1997. Brantz, Dorothee, Sasha Disko and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds. Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Briggs, Daniel, ed. The English Riots of 2011: A Summer of Discontent. Hook: Waterside, 2012. Chandler, James, and Kevin Gilmartin, eds. Romantic Metropolis. The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840. Cambridge up, 2005. Dart, Gregory, ed. Re-imagining the City. Special Issue of Romanticism 14.2 (2008). Fuccaro, Nelida, ed. Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East. Stanford up, 2016. Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 3–30. Grierson, Jamie. “Police would struggle to deal with repeat of 2011 riots, says senior officer.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 23 June 2017. Web. 10 Oct. 2017.

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Hatuka, Tali. Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv: Revisioning Moments. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010. Kennedy, Maev. “Tottenham: echoes of a history not forgotten as rioting returns.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 7 Aug. 2011. Web. 19 Sept. 2016. Kohl, Johann Georg. England, Wales and Scotland. Chapman and Hall, 1844. Lefebvre, Henri. La production de l’espace. Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Mörtenböck, Peter, and Helge Mooshammer. Occupy: Räume des Protests. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Nuselovici, Alexis, Mauro Ponzi and Fabio Vighi, eds. Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces: Threshold Experiences. Plymouth: Lexington, 2014. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis. Women, the City, and Modernity. ­Oxford up, 2000. Peer, Larry H., ed. Romanticism and the City. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 Simmel, Georg: “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The Blackwell City Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 103–110. [Engl. transl. of “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben” (1903)]. Stanley, Tim. “History shows that the London riots were predictable, because the British just aren’t very nice people.” Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug. 2011. Suleyman, Chimene. “A moment that changed me: walking home through the London riots in 2011.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 4 Aug. 2017. Web. 10 Oct. 2017. Taunton, Matthew. Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Tester, Keith ed. The Flâneur. London: Routledge, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj. “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” London Review of Books. lrb, 19 Aug. 2011. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.

Introduction: Negotiating Urban Space Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer The second volume of Resistance and the City is devoted to the three big markers of identity that cultural studies has identified as paramount to our ­understanding of difference, inequality, and solidarity in modern societies: race, class, and gender. These categories, deeply entangled in the mechanics of power, domination and subordination, have often played an eminent role in contemporary struggles and clashes in urban space. The confluence of people from diverse ethnic, social, and sexual backgrounds in the city has not only raised their awareness of a variety of life concepts and motivated them to ­negotiate their own positions, but has also encouraged them to develop strategies of resistance against patterns of social and spatial exclusion. The city thus serves as a focal point for today’s tensions.

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The racial conflicts in western and postcolonial societies that have become visible from the 1960s onwards are to a large extent an urban phenomenon. The volume’s first section on “Race and Ethnicity” recollects that the colour line frequently runs through the cities, segregating the black from the white populations in their respective territories. The essays collected in this part highlight the different narrative methods employed in films and novels for the presentation of racial and ethnic challenges. In her article, Ingrid von Rosenberg takes a closer look at two black British films from the turbulent 1970s and 1980s that represent different tendencies in black film production, Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975) and John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986). Her particular interest lies in the presentation of city space for the construction and self-assertion of black identity. While the black characters in Pressure gradually appropriate the streets of poorer neighbourhoods in London, they keep out of the centres of power. Von Rosenberg then juxtaposes the realist approach of this film with the more experimental montage technique of Handsworth Songs, which includes the combination of historical photographs and clips with contemporary footage. Towards the end of the film, a hopeful scenario unfolds, as we see black citizens using street space in a concerted and disciplined fashion for a mass demonstration. Von Rosenberg also offers insights into the lively discussions about filmmaking at that time, for instance by citing the different reactions of postcolonial scholars like Salman Rushdie and Stuart Hall. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_003

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Focussing on the representation of translocation experiences, Ralf ­Schneider looks at three British films from the early 2000s that deal with migrant populations: In Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Kenneth Glenaan’s, ­Yasmin (2004), and Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering (2006) Schneider observes not only the repressive, yet often internalised forces of social segregation and self-segregation from which these groups suffer, but also the spatial strategies that serve these marginal groups in coping with, if not resisting, their own marginalisation. As he draws on Yuri Lotman’s differentiation of topographical and topological space, multifaceted practices become visible with which the migrant communities in these movies charge the spaces they inhabit with new meaning. A postcolonial perspective on urban forms of resistance is offered by ­Katrin Röder’s reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Combining Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia with Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of ­cultural hybridity, she invites her readers to explore Rushdie’s creation of ­resilient spaces, which not only defy traditional political dichotomies of left and right, dominance and submission, but also harbour elements of direct democracy. Concentrating on Rushdie’s narrative construction of such fictional places as the Methwold Villa in Bombay or the detention centre in Benares, Röder points out how Rushdie’s magic realism fosters alternative realities which form the political subtext to Midnight’s Children. Surveying the landscape of black British fiction in the last decades, M ­ erle Tönnies and Anna Lienen discern two major strands of novel writing that are related to different presentations of urban space. First, the ‘black British ­Bildungsroman’, which exists in predominantly male and female varieties, typically aligns the character development of its protagonist (or one of its protagonists) with the spatial movement into the city. Conversely, in the second strand, the somewhat neglected group of novels about the ‘black male underclass’, the possibility of personal and social advancement appears to be small and movement is extremely inhibited. Even though the characters in novels like Courttia Newland’s The Scholar: A West Side Story (1997), Alex Wheatle’s East of Acre Lane (2001), and The Dirty South (2008) usually live in the inner-city districts and thus in the geographical centres of the country, they are excluded from mainstream society. While these novels create an atmosphere of hopelessness, they may also motivate readers to oppose restricting structures.

...

After the importance of ‘class’ in cultural and literary studies had been ­diminished for decades, the financial crises of the new century have renewed

Introduction: Negotiating Urban Space

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academic interest in economic inequality, social exclusion and political disempowerment. The contributions to the second section on “Social Class” attest that it is particularly rewarding to consider these issues in conjunction with spatial urban structures. In his close reading of the song and the music video “Common People” by the Britpop band Pulp, Christoph Singer concentrates on the fascination a working-class lifestyle exerts on the privileged members of society. “Common People” does not only deconstruct the ‘myth of authenticity’ that motivates the rich to go ‘slumming’, but also exposes the mind-set of ‘patronising social voyeurism’. Singer, who works within the framework of Roland Barthes’, Pierre Bourdieu’s, and Jean Baudrillard’s theories, pays attention to the spatial organisation of the narrative unfolding in the lyrics and the music clip and looks at the symbolism of places like the college, the club, the supermarket and rental houses. Frank Erik Pointner explains how the image of a new urban underclass, referred to by the label ‘chavs’, has recently been constructed by the media. Whereas the older term ‘working class’ is mostly associated with a degree of respectability, chavs are usually presented as utterly irresponsible, lazy, drawn to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and cheap tawdry clothes. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into social markers, Pointner throws light on the psychological mechanisms involved in the formation of this stereotype, particularly the sense of superiority relished by middle-class people. In Pointner’s discussion of Grace Dent’s novel Trainers V. Tiaras (2007) and J.K. Rowling’s novel The Casual Vacancy (2012) different attitudes toward the lower strata of society become visible. Analysing Rowling’s narrative strategies, Pointner puts a particular emphasis on the geographical barriers and contact zones between the classes. A different perspective on the city is offered by Mark Schmitt, who discusses a form of existence that inevitably questions and challenges concepts of urban life. In his analysis of Lenny Abrahamson’s 2004 film Adam & Paul the representation of the homelessness of the protagonists emerges as a means by which Dublin acquires a new aspect. Seeing the city from the margin, the film subverts the notion of Dublin as the dynamic centre of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. With his film, Abrahamson challenges his audience to rethink the cinematic strategies of depicting urban space. Barbara Korte approaches the topic of civic resistance from an alternative, dystopian perspective. In her essay, she focuses on two recent science fiction texts, Jonathan Trigell’s novel Genus (2011) and Joe Cornish’s film Attack on the Block (2011). Novel and film share a concern for the social division in a future Britain and envision a society that has accepted and institutionalised

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its inner class segregation. Where Trigell’s novel has the socially and genetically marginalised contained in a King’s Cross ghetto, hiding from a society of ­genetic ­perfection, Joe Cornish’s film tells the story of survival in a Brixton slum ­attacked by aliens. The urban space is turned into a dystopian nightmare of inhumanity not quite inadvertently commenting on the social crisis that was at the bottom of the riots which shook the city a few months after the release of these texts in 2011.

...

That gender intersects with space in various ways belongs to the fundamental insights of the feminist movement – from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) to the critical discourse about “separate spheres”. This c­ onnection has recently attracted particular attention in gender studies (e.g. Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz, 2016). The third section “Gender and Sexuality” first f­ ocusses on the presentation of masculinity and femininity in the urban context. The last two essays discuss non-normative sexual orientation as factor in our perception of city space. Gill Plain explores modes of urban resistance in connection to violence, space, and gender in recent urban crime fiction, particularly in George ­Pelecanos’ Derek Strange trilogy – Right as Rain (2001), Hell to Pay (2002), and Soul Circus (2003/2004). According to Plain, Pelecanos offers two different strategies of resistance against the destructive forces of the city, in this case Washington dc: On a larger scale, he presents the reader with the deadly, yet organised resistance of dc drug gangs which challenge the hegemony of a (mostly) racist police department. On the level of the individual, in contrast, Pelecanos’ novels suggest an excessive performance of masculinity to defy the forces of capitalism and gentrification, in order to propagate the myth of the city-as-village. In doing so, they give a voice to the countless young blacks whose suffering is regularly suppressed by both national and local news in the us. Thus, the novels render African-Americans – using Judith Butler’s terminology – grievable. However, their idea of gender is augmented by the effacement of femininity from public spaces and therefore undermines the notion of the city as a progressive space. Among urban spaces that potentially harbour subversive elements, the balcony is an easily overlooked yet truly urban space of resistance. In fact, Sabine Smith shows in her essay how this small, interstitial annex which is neither inside nor fully outside becomes the site of a multitude of countercultural practices. In a discussion that moves from the balconies in nineteenth-century Lima to that in contemporary Berlin, the balcony emerges as a highly charged

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space in which established gender roles can be questioned, as in the case of Peruvian women, or which offers refuge from oppressive ideologies for which the city as a social organisation stands. By drawing on Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, Smith uses two famous literary examples in which the balcony becomes the lovers’ retreat from the strict hierarchical and patriarchal order of the city. Thus, the essay outlines patterns of cultural practice that have characterised the representation and function of the balcony across cultures and throughout history. In his essay, Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz turns to the discrimination of lgbt people by Muslim fundamentalists in Britain. The basis of Lindner’s analysis is a YouTube video by a self-styled ‘Muslim Patrol’ in which religious radicals try to define their East London neighbourhood as a gay-free ‘Muslim area’ by harassing and expelling a supposedly homosexual man. This video is then juxtaposed with a clip from the bbc News website with gay rights activist Peter Tatchell’s covering of the homophobic incident. Lindner is not only interested in the way the videos are constructed, but raises a number of general questions about the concept of ‘urban resistance’ in academic discourse. While resistance in Postcolonial Studies is primarily conceived as an emancipatory counter-hegemonic activity, the realities of conflicts between groups in today’s cities require a more nuanced conceptual and terminological framework. Ger Zielinski sheds a critical light on three adaptations of the same urban narrative: Richard Miles’ controversial original novel That Cold Day in the Park (1965), Robert Altman’s watered down feature film of the same name (1969), and Bruce LaBruce’s postmodernist parody of the latter, No Skin Off My Ass (1991). Following Henri Lefebvre’s theory of reflexive representations of the city, Zielinski explores how urban spaces are constructed in the three respective texts with regard to their role in provoking alternative scenes and ­identities to the dominant gay culture. He particularly focuses on LaBruce’s version of the narrative, set in Toronto, and interprets it both as a daring re-queering of the city (after Altman had de-radicalised and popularised Miles’ dauntless debut novel) and as an extension of LaBruce’s earlier engagement in homocore zine culture of the 1980s, an alternative and oppositional subculture to mainstream gay culture.

Part 1 Race and Ethnicity

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Chapter 1

Black Citizens – British Spaces: Struggles in the 1970s and 1980s and Cinematic Representations Ingrid von Rosenberg Abstract The black struggle for equality in British society reached a peak in the 1970s and 1980s, and public spaces were an important venue. Representations mirrored and supported these efforts. After a brief sketch of the economic and social situation of the black population, this article focuses on the analysis of two seminal films, representing d­ ifferent stages in black film history, in which street scenes, symbolising steps in the fight for equality, play a central role: Horace Ové’s Pressure, a film narrative from 1975 in the realist tradition, and John Akomfrah`s Handsworth Songs, a highly acclaimed experimental documentary from 1986.

Keywords John Akomfrah – Horace Ové – bafc (Black Audio Film Collective) – black British consciousness – workshop movement – realist black film tradition – experimental black film – Windrush generation – Scarman Report – racially induced street fights

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Introduction

Postcolonial theory has long recognised the importance of space discourses for the fashioning of collective selves, especially in diasporic situations. E ­ dward W. Soja writes for instance: “[…] links between space, knowledge, power and cultural politics must be seen as both oppressive and enabling, filled not only with authoritarian perils but also with possibilities for community, ­resistance, and emancipatory change” (Soja 87). The history of black people’s ­efforts to achieve equal rights in the use of British public spaces as well as the ­opposition set up by some groups among the white majority reads like an ­illustration to this statement. The 1970s and 1980s were a crucial time for these struggles. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_004

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In this article, I will first sketch the historical facts and then analyse two films as exemplary attempts to support their struggle by representations. 2

The Economic and Social Situation of Black Citizens in the 1970s and 1980s

As is well-known, black immigration to post-war Britain began with a legendary event: the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. 492 people from the Caribbean came in response to advertisements of the British Government and companies encouraging people to work in Britain to compensate for the war losses in manpower. The Windrush generation, as they came to be known, did not only come with high hopes for a warm welcome and good jobs, but also full of pleasant anticipation to see the ‘motherland’, especially the capital, which school books had described seductively. Symptomatic was the song which Lord Kitchener, alias Aldwyn Roberts, one of the most famous Calypsonians from the ­Caribbean of the twentieth century, sang into a microphone on arrival with the E­ mpire Windrush: London is the place for me, London this lovely city. You can go to France or America, India, Asia or Australia, But you must come back to London city. […] To live in London you are really comfortable, Because the English people are very much sociable, They take you here and they take you there, And they make you feel like a millionaire, London that’s the place for me.1 Initially some of the immigrants’ hopes were fulfilled: in the 1950s most found work, though mainly menial jobs in industry and state-run enterprises, children mixed with white class mates at school, and black and white young ­people met in youth clubs and on dance floors. Soon, however, the newcomers realised that Lord Kitchener’s image of the English people was too rosy: they experienced rejection and racism on the streets as well as in their search for decent accommodation or better employment. As the inflow of immigrants 1 The full lyrics are available on the internet. See for instance: songmeanings.com/songs/ view/3530822107859461444/. One can also listen to the song on YouTube.

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from the colonies and ex-colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia did not stop, but increased from year to year (until from 1962 on Conservative and ­Labour Governments in succession reduced the numbers by a sequence of Commonwealth Immigrants Acts), social tensions grew. Twenty years later things reached a low point. After the post-war boom and consensus politics came to an end in the early 1970s, Britain slid into the “worst recession any industrial country experienced since the 1930s” (May 462). Some reasons were home-made like the lack of investment in industry, strained relations between employers and trade unions and an unbalanced budget. E ­ xternal influences such as increasing world prices for raw materials and the rising oil price as a result of the oil crisis of 1973 aggravated the situation.2 Many firms were driven into liquidation (462), and manufacture in particular went into decline. The British share of world trade in manufacturing was almost halved from 16.5 per cent in 1960 to 8.6 in 1990 (Marwick 273). This caused a great loss in jobs: employment in manufacture fell from 8.7 million in 1966 continually to only 4.4 million in 1992 (May 471–472).3 At the same time the long decline of heavy industry, ship building and mining began. Black people, to a large percentage employed in these sectors, were particularly affected by the growing unemployment. The young were worst hit: while average unemployment in 1983 ran at 12.4 percent (Marwick 291), 26 percent of young black males were out of work. Additionally, blacks had to struggle with further disadvantages. In education, their chances were reduced by factors such as the very small number of black teachers and negative expectations of white teachers (cf. Hall, “Diaspora” 227). As far as housing was concerned, the majority had to live in run-down Victorian dwellings or in cheap council housing estates. Racist attitudes intensified and were exploited by re-­awakening Fascist groups. Several splinter groups formed the National Front in 1967, which by 1973 had attracted 17,500 members. Their influence dwindled, however, as members of the Conservative Party took over some of their positions. Notorious was Enoch Powell’s infamous speech of 1968, when he warned the country that “rivers of blood” would flow if more immigrants were allowed to come. One of the darkest chapters was (and still is) the apparent ­institutional racism of the police. Young black males were ten times more likely to be “stopped and searched” for no apparent reason (under the so-called sus – for “suspect” – law put down in the ancient Vagrancy Act of 1824) by the police than white 2 The opec countries cut the oil supply to western countries by 25% in reaction to their ­support of Israel in the Yom-Kippur War. 3 In the late 1980s and 1990s the growing service sector and self-employment in Thatcher’s “enterprise society” compensated some of the job losses.

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young men, and once arrested and in custody, they were more likely to suffer maltreatment or even become victims of “unlawful killings.” (Institute of Race Relations, Deadly Silence, passim). While the majority of the black population put up quietly with the situation, especially young people were provoked into reactions. Many felt drawn to the counter-culture of Rastafarianism, but the experience of ongoing discrimination also led to aggressive actions. A gang and crime culture developed, and uprisings, by media and authorities called “riots”, broke out in the streets of London or the cities of the Midlands, where most blacks lived, usually triggered by some smaller conflict like a traffic offence and mercilessly quenched by the police. The first happened in 1958 in Notting Hill and Nottingham (fuelled by white Teddy Boys), followed by smaller ones in the 1960s and 1970s, reaching a climax after the first two years of the Thatcher government in 1981. As a result of growing deprivation and racial tension, street fighting broke out in Brixton/ London, Toxteth/Liverpool, St. Paul’s/Bristol and Handsworth/Birmingham. A committee under Lord Scarman, set up by an alarmed government, confirmed the biased behaviour of the police and asked for urgent action to reduce racial disadvantages. Yet despite and alongside these confrontations also positive developments took place. One was registered by Stuart Hall in his essay “Minimal Selves” of 1987. He wrote: I’ve been puzzled by the fact that young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchised, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as if they owned the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything, are centered, in place. Without much material support, it’s true, but nevertheless they occupy a new kind of space at the center. 114; cf. gilroy 203

Music, street fashion, dancing and the style of walking – the streets functioning as the prominent stage – are the fields in which black people became ­cultural trendsetters. Significantly, in 2004 the Victoria and Albert Museum dedicated a publication with many photographs to Black Style. Another triumph is the history of the Notting Hill Carnival. Started in 1959 as a small local event ­celebrated indoors in St. Pancras Town Hall, it moved out into the streets in 1966, ­immediately attracting 1.000 people. For many years suspiciously watched by large numbers of police, the Carnival with its steel pan groups and costume dancers has grown into one of the biggest events in London’s cultural calendar.

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The Growth of a Black British Consciousness

The decades from the 1960s to the 1980s saw a gradual change in black people’s self-perception. A specific black consciousness was articulated, influenced by the Black Power Movement in the us, but in its special British version formulated by black British intellectuals such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer as well as by artists from all fields. Starting point was the insight that, as Stuart Hall repeatedly stressed, cultural identity is not an accomplished historical fact, but a “production” always in process and to an important extent constituted within representations (“Cinematic Representation” 210). A return to essentialist concepts of blackness harking back to lost countries and cultures was rejected and instead an identity formulated which took into account the reality of the present hybrid situation and was specifically black ­British. Writers, musicians, visual artists and filmmakers, all gone through British educational institutions and many well-versed in the emancipatory discourses of the time, felt challenged to promote this process of identity building with their work, though they might argue from varying political positions. Filmmakers faced special difficulties, as the considerable sums of money necessary for production as well as access to distribution channels were hard to come by. ­Nevertheless, since the 1960s short documentaries and some trendsetting shorts (Jemima and Johnny from 1964, Ten Bob in Winter from 1963) were produced with private financing, all portraying black life in a realistic way and from a black perspective. In the following I will look at two seminal full-length films from the period representing two very different trends in black filmmaking, with particular attention to the significance given to public spaces, especially city streets as the arena where decisive struggles for an equal place in British society took place. Both films meant a step forward in the public acceptance of black filmmaking in so far as they were produced with public money and shown in commercial cinemas, not only in small community venues as had been the rule before. 4

The Film Pressure and the Significance of Its Street Scenes

The first full-length black feature film was Pressure from 1975, directed by ­Horace Ové and now a classic. Ové, born in Trinidad in 1939, came to Britain in 1960 to study, first painting and photography, later film technique and has made his career as one of the outstanding black photographers and f­ ilmmakers in the country. In 2007 he was honoured with a cbe. His work was influenced by the Italian neo-realist film, since as a young man he had worked in Rome for

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some of the great directors like Vittorio de Sica and Michelangelo Antonioni. Pressure followed a number of shorter documentaries on black culture, which had brought Ové recognition in the film world.4 The script for Pressure, written by Ové and novelist Sam Selvon, continued in the realist tradition. Ové received funding for his low-budget project from the British Film Institute, but the movie was not released for three years because of some scenes showing Black Power activists. The movie tells a coming-of-age story in the sense of black consciousness. The central figure Tony, a school leaver with best marks, is caught in a generational conflict and torn between two sets of values: his mother’s wish for total assimilation (reflected in her choice of clothes, hairstyle, food and furniture), and his elder brother Colin’s Black Power politics, which after a ­series of bitter disappointments, Tony joins in the end. The action is set in inner and outer locations, arranged in a telling dichotomy. The most important inner space is home, where the family withdraws to relax and the mother can dream of smooth integration. Another interior place is a lecture hall, where Colin’s political group is holding a peaceful meeting discussing better educational chances for black young people. The streets of London are the attractive alternative space, where black youngsters seek freedom and fun, but are also threatened by racist encounters and police harassment. In the course of the a­ ction the borders between inner and outer spaces crumble, as the police breaks into both sheltered places, and Colin and his friends are arrested. Nevertheless, ­Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg in their study of black and Asian British films maintain that Pressure documents that “young black Britons during the 70s were stepping out into the streets of London, appropriating its space with a new kind of cultural confidence and a stance of resistance against discrimination” (Korte and Sternberg 57). Street scenes documenting the difficult beginnings of this appropriating process play an important part. Interestingly, however, the public spaces contested in the film are not (yet) the squares and boulevards of the city centre, traditional headquarters of the hegemonic powers, but the streets of Ladbroke Grove, at the time a run-down residential area of London where many ­immigrants lived – indeed a modest beginning of black people’s struggle to appropriate city space. The street scenes are arranged in a kind of subliminal 4 Earlier documentaries by Ové were Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), Reggae (1971) and King Carnival (1973), all made for bbc. After Pressure Ové continued to make documentaries, but also contributed to tv series, for instance Empire Road, and produced some tv comedies. A second much acclaimed feature was Playing Away (1987), a satirical film on race and gender relations and the national passion for cricket.

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storyline of their own. In one of the first, a long sequence, Tony, after an unsuccessful job interview, is followed by the camera, as he is walking along a shopping street, the only black person in a white crowd, with a sullen expression on his face. Nobody attacks him, but also nobody takes notice of him. Dressed in a proper suit, shirt and coat, he looks like any well-educated white kid of the time, but his skin colour marks him out as “other”. Later scenes show young black people adopting a stance of subjectivity in the streets, yet they represent two different black attitudes to London’s public spaces: One attitude is presented as problematic, as it may – and the plot shows it will – lead into deeper marginalisation. Tony, feeling rejected and lonely, joins a group of jobless youngsters, who are leading a seemingly jolly life, squatting in a derelict house und skilfully stealing from fruit stalls in the ­local market. Again, the camera follows them at length, as they are weaving their way through the predominantly white crowd, determined to “get their own back on society”. Yet criminality offers only an illusion of control: in a supermarket, the boys are detected, and after a wild chase one of them is arrested. A more positive and assertive use of public space is made by Tony’s brother Colin and Luise, two political activists. They have set up a stall in the market to campaign for Black Power politics. Cheerfully they address passersby, hand out leaflets and invite people to a meeting on educational questions. Tony meets them and talks to Colin, but annoyed by his brother’s exhortations to engage in political work rather than to get involved in petty theft, he turns his back on them to walk off with the louts. Significantly, the closing scene of the film is again set in the street. Tony, shocked by the brutal handling of ­Colin, Luise and other black activists in the police station, has by now joined the political group and takes part in a demonstration. A very small, dejected group of demonstrators are campaigning with posters in the pouring rain for Colin’s release from custody and equal rights for black people, while a policeman is already phoning for support – a truly depressing closure to the film (cf. Pines 189). A new generation of filmmakers and cultural theoreticians respectfully praised Pressure – together with other realist films like Menelik Shabbaz’s Step Forward Youth from 1977 and Burning an Illusion from 1981 –, but they also criticised them as limited in perspective. Cultural critic Kobena Mercer, for instance, acknowledged that they “provided a counter-discourse against those versions of reality produced by dominant voices and discourses in British film and media” and “demonstrate a counter-reply to the criminalizing stereotypes generated and amplified by media-led moral panics on race and crime in the seventies” (“Diaspora Culture” 57). Realism, Mercer argues, rests on the assumption that there is an objective reality “out there”, that one can

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tell the story “as it really is”, but in fact remains trapped in the dominant “race relations discourse” spread by the media (“Recording Narratives” 84, cf. Pines 187). Neither Pressure nor any other black film in the realist tradition offers an alternative, hopeful perspective for the successful construction of black British subjectivity. 5

New Chances for Black Film: The Workshop Movement

The “riots” of 1981 did not only alarm the government. Partly motivated by the Scarman Report, liberal and left-wing people, perceiving blacks in a “state of emergency” (Fisher, “Living Memory” 16, using a term by Giorgio Agamben), discussed possibilities to reduce the tensions through cultural interventions. An important motor of activity became the Labour-dominated Greater ­London Council (abolished by Thatcher in 1986), which set up an Ethnic ­Minority ­Committee including a Black Arts Division. Under the glc’s ­influence, a Workshop Declaration was signed by representatives of various cultural and ­political institutions in 1981, among them the British Film Institute (bfi) and the Regional Arts Association. It was an agreement to subsidise non-­commercial filmmaking by black and Asian British artists to create more opportunities for expressing black and Asian perspectives. Channel 4, founded in 1982 with a remit to promote multicultural representations, joined the ranks of black film supporters and has been one of the steadiest ever since. Five workshops were set up and financed for five years, of which Black Audio Film Collective (bafc), Sankofa Film and Video Collective and Ceddo Film and Video Workshop became the most productive. The members were young first-generation immigrants, who had come to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s to study at British universities, art and film schools, where they became familiar with the ‘classic’ works of critical cultural, psychoanalytical and postcolonial theories, but also with the writings of ­contemporary black British theorists like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha and Kobena Mercer. As workshop members, they pursued a highflying aim: they saw themselves “as catalysts of a community to come” (Eshun, “­Drawing” 82). Blackness had for them a “dimension of potentiality” (ibid.), was an unfinished, open concept. Collective instead of individual authorship was an important element of the workshops’ programme (as the names of the groups indicate), another was the active role ascribed to the viewers in the intention to break down the “distinction between ‘producer’ and ‘audience’” (Akomfrah 144).

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Central concern was to find a new filmic language to express black experiences more adequately than in the earlier realistic films. It was deemed important to get away from the language of lament and from a monologic tendency totalizing one black experience to “a dialogic tendency which is responsive to the diverse and complex qualities of our black Britishness and British ­blackness – our differentiated specificity as a diaspora people” (­Mercer, “Diaspora Culture” 62). The form of representation was an issue of central importance to the workshops; Eshun even talks of “an obsessive attention to form” (89). Film history was searched for possible inspiration. In effect, they combined ­influences from the British documentary movement of the 1930s, Third World Cinema and – perhaps most important – first world avant-garde films of the early 20th century. Representation was no longer seen as a mimetic process, but “as a process of selection, combination and articulation of signifying elements” (Mercer, “Recoding Narratives” 88). Collage technique and the implementation of significant patterns of sound and image – sometimes in meaningful contrast – became characteristics of the workshop films. Techniques used in television, especially the fast-pace editing and non-narrative structures of advertising and music videos, probably also exerted an influence on the filmmakers (cf. Fusco, “Black Avantgarde?” 19). 6

Handsworth Songs

The black struggle for the use of British spaces was a topic in several workshop films, most of them short ones.5 The outstanding feature-length film dealing with the issue was Handsworth Songs made by the Black Audio Film Collective (founded in 1982) and directed by John Akomfrah in 1986. Akomfrah, born in Ghana in 1955, came to England after a political coup in 1966 and, after school, studied sociology at Portsmouth Polytechnic. Handsworth Songs was bafc’s second project and came to be considered the “key work” of the bafc (­Enwezor 118), on which academic and media attention has concentrated. It was made for the Channel 4 series Britain: The Lie of the Land, but was soon 5 Such short films were The People’s Account (1986), a documentary on the 1985 riots made by Ceddo and directed by Milton Bryan, Territories (1984) a documentary about the Nottinghill Carnival, directed by Isaac Julien and made by Sankofa, Riots and Rumours of Riots (1981), a documentary on black British history from World War ii to the 1958 riots made in 1980, directed by Imruh Cesar and produced by the national Film School, and Menelik Shabazz’s Blood Ah Go Run (1982) on the Brixton Riots of 1981, produced by Kuumba Black Arts.

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also screened in cinemas, premiering in the West End of London. Not surprisingly, in this film the black presence in British public spaces is handled in a manner very different from the straightforward narrative approach of Pressure, made ten years before. The events behind Akomfrah’s film were the so-called “Handsworth Riots”, which happened between 9 and 11 September 1985. Handsworth is an area of Birmingham, the second most populous city in the country with a 30 per cent ethnic population (according to the 2001 census). Like earlier uprisings the “­riots” of 1985 were sparked by a small occurrence, in this case the arrest of a black man after a police search and a raid on a nearby pub, but the deeper ­reasons were continuing marginalisation and deprivation, especially the ongoing high rate of unemployment among the black youth. As several studies convincingly prove, politicians from both parties (Home Secretary Hurd and Labour MP Jeff Rooker) plus Chief Constable Geoffrey Dear, in contrast to the riots of 1981 when unemployment was widely discussed as a reason, ignored the serious social problems behind the unrest and put it down to “the growth of crime and drug dealing in the area” (Solomos 199. See also Van Dijk and Fazakarley). Hurd, for instance, said in a speech before police chiefs: “The sound which law-abiding people heard at Handsworth was not a cry for help but a cry for loot” (Daily Telegraph of 13 September 1985, quoted in Solomos 199). This version was taken up by the press, tabloids as well as serious p ­ apers. They wrote about “law and disorder in Handsworth” (The Financial Times 15  ­September 1985) or “pure naked vandalism and outrageous violence and theft” (Daily Mail 10 ­September 1985, quoted in Solomos 199). The bafc’s film, made one year after the events, was an attempt to deconstruct the hegemonic reports of the media and to offer an alternative perspective. As characteristic for the workshop movies, the film was constructed in a montage technique, a bricolage, whose elements are carefully selected and joined to a composition, which has been aptly called “poetic and political without being didactic” (Fisher, “Living Memory” 19). The visual materials were news reel fragments, archival footage and photographs, on-site interviews and images of symbolic objects (a clown figure waving its hand like royalty, a flock of birds against a night sky, a monument, etc.). The images are accompanied by an equally varied soundtrack designed by Trevor Mathison and made up of disparate elements such as the voices of interviewees, narrative voice-overs, songs including a dub version of Jerusalem, original electronic compositions, drum beats, the noises of police cars, sirens, breaking glass and street fighting. Various perspectives of local citizens, political activists, politicians, policemen are presented, even Margaret Thatcher’s view in an extract from an interview of October 1974, in which she talks about the country’s fear of being “swamped”

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by foreigners. The filmmakers refuse to give an open authoritarian interpretation, as Eddie Chambers observes: the film “does not privilege any one voice, or community of voices” (Chambers 29). Though viewers seem to be left to form their own opinions, they are, of course, in fact subtly directed by the selection and arrangement of images and sound track. A distinguishing feature of the film is that it is not limited to current events, but the past is interwoven into the present, based on the conviction that ­behind every event there is a history. Historical photographs and archival f­ootage ­document early stages of black British history from the arrival of the Windrush (the newcomers dressed in their best clothes as on a festive occasion) to scenes of peaceful black integration in the 1950s and 1960s: proud families, a mixed wedding, dance hall scenes and a reception with black and white participants, a school class with happily smiling black and white kids. These testimonies of hopeful beginnings are then juxtaposed with scenes of the present conflicts, verbal and physical. Interestingly, some scenes do not show Handsworth, but refer to events that happened in London. Okwui Enwezor has suggested that the film is in fact not only about the events in Handsworth in 1985, not even about Britain, but “as much about elsewhere as about Britain. That elsewhere is the broader post-colonial world” (120). He reads the film as an “analytical essay” on the conflictual situation caused by “trans-national post-colonialism” (117). The opening sequence of Handsworth Songs, which is continued at i­ntervals, reaches even further back in history than 1948: an early machine in a museum of technology is shown while a black janitor in uniform proudly ­explains the mechanism and praises the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, in a subtle way, slavery, the main source of capital for the Industrial Revolution, is linked to the later stages of black history in Britain. 7

Street Scenes in Handsworth Songs

Street scenes play an important role in Handsworth Songs and can be read as forming a sub-narrative, similar to Pressure, but carrying a hopeful message. In the first part of the film, scenes of destruction dominate, representing the deplorable status-quo. Several sequences display overturned cars and vans, glass splinters and rubble, while elderly citizens watch from windows and doorsteps or walk about bewildered and a milkman picks his way through the chaos. Policemen stand in groups, and Home Secretary Hurd speaks to l­ocal people. Actual tumult is not shown, especially no acts of violence committed by black people. But suddenly the viewers witness a police chase of a black young man with Rasta curls, who is caught and brutally beaten up, while ­bystanders

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(­indifferent or frightened?) watch without interfering. This scene, clear evidence of police violence, was not filmed in Handsworth, but taken from news reel footage of the Brixton “Riots” of 1981. In the later parts of the film, increasingly peaceful sequences are given room. One is a mournful occasion, shot in London, this time shortly after the events in Handsworth. The funeral cortege for Mrs. Cynthia Jarrett is shown, an elderly lady, who died of a heart attack on 5 October 1985, when the ­police stormed her flat in search for goods her son was supposed to have stolen (he was later acquitted). This brutal act had triggered the so-called Broadwater Farm Riots in Tottenham, North London, but the filmmakers did not include footage documenting the street battles: images of fighting black men might have supported the stereotpye of the dangerous black male. By contrast, the rather long shot of the ceremonious funeral procession of big, flower-covered limousines, the mourners observing a traditional ritual by leaving the cars and accompanying the van with the hearse on foot, document black people’s ability to use public spaces with dignity. The last scenes of the film, again a peaceful sequence, show a straightforward political use of street space, a disciplined demonstration. It happened also in the aftermath of an act of police violence against another elderly black woman. Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce was shot in bed on 28 September 1985 in ­Brixton, while the police were searching for her son, whom they suspected of a fire-arms offence. She received a bullet in her hip which left her paralysed from the waist down. Again, scenes of street fighting (which did happen) are avoided, and instead a sober political reaction documented. The impressively big march stands in marked contrast to the pitiful little procession at the end of Pressure: black citizens appear much more self-confident in expressing their grievances and claims. Thus the final scenes of Handsworth Songs can be read as an expression of political hope. 8

The Reception of Handsworth Songs

The film won seven important prizes, the most prestigious being the bfi ­ rierson Award for the best documentary in 1987. It also triggered a lively G ­discussion about appropriate black film aesthetics, which began with a controversy in The Guardian. There was an almost hostile review by Salman ­Rushdie under the heading “Song Doesn’t Know the Score” in The Guardian of 12 ­January 1987. Rushdie complained that instead of telling stories of the people living in Handsworth, the film only used “the dead language of raceindustry professionals”. “What we get is what we know from tv. Blacks as

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­trouble, blacks as victims” (Rushdie 262). This review was supported in the issue of 19 January by black activist Darcus Howe, who praised this “well-written and thoughtful piece of criticism.” (Howe 265) American cultural critic Coco Fusco in an ­interview with bafc suspected that Rushdie’s brusque dismissal of Handsworth Songs had to do “with something larger than the film” (Fusco, “Interview” 48–49). This “larger thing” was then identified by Lina Gopal and John Akomfrah in the interview as “transgression”, because the film “clearly didn’t fall into line with the established concordat concerning the Black intelligentsia and their discussion of race”, as it “reopened the questions rather than repeat the answers” (49–50). Great support came from Stuart Hall, who had been among the advisory team for the film. Immediately after Rushdie’s criticism, he defended it under the heading “Song of Handsworth Praise” in The Guardian of 15 January 1987. Rejecting Rushdie’s criticism as arrogant, he maintained that in fact the film had tried out a new language, to “get away from the tired style of the riot-documentary”. He specially praised the reworking of the archival footage and the highly original sound track, which both helped to tell the black experience as a specially English experience (Hall, “Song” 264). Recently Handsworth Songs has enjoyed a remarkable revival, not only because its aesthetic quality is more and more appreciated, but also because it has gained an unexpected topicality after the events of 9/11, 7/7 and again in 2011. It has been shown at important exhibitions and cultural events, both national and international. Thus, it was screened at documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 and in Making History, Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now at the Tate Liverpool in 2006. The latter exhibition toured to the gallery of fact (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool in 2007 under the title The Ghosts of Songs. A Retrospective of bafc and was followed by a comprehensive book publication celebrating the work of the bafc (edited by Eshun and Sagar, The Ghost of Songs). More recently Handsworth Songs was shown at the Tate Modern on 26 August 2011, when it seemed to the reviewer Mark Fisher an “­eerily (un)timely” comment on the uprisings of that summer which were no longer primarily racially induced (Fisher, “The Land still lies”). The performance was followed by an intense three-hour discussion with members of the bafc. No doubt, the film has become a milestone in film history having left its mark on the discussion of black film aesthetics. What remains an open question, however, is whether it has ever attracted large audiences of average ­cinema goers, especially black ones, as had been one of the original aims of the workshop members who had hoped to enhance black people’s political self-confidence through their work.

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Works Cited Primary References

Handsworth Songs. Dir. John Akomfrah. Perf. Pervais Khan and Meera Syal. Collective, 1986. Film. Pressure. Dir. Horace Ové. Perf. Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, et al. 1976. Film.

Research Literature Akomfrah, John. “Black Independent Film-Making: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective”. 1983. The Ghosts of Songs. The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1986. Ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Liverpool up, 2007. 144–145. Chambers, Eddie. “Handsworth Songs and the Archival Image”. Ghosting: the Role of the Archive Within Contemporary British Artists’ Film and Video. Ed. Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon. Bristol: Picture This, 2006. 24–33. Enwezor, Okwui. “Coalition Building: Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational Post-Colonialism.” The Ghosts of Songs. The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1986. Ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Liverpool up, 2007. 106–123. Eshun, Kodwo. “Drawing the Forms of Things Unknown…” The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1986. Ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Liverpool up, 2007. 74–99. Eshun, Kodwo, and Anjalika Sagar, eds. The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1986. Liverpool up, 2007. Fazakarley, Jed. “Racisms ‘Old’ and ‘New’ at Handsworth, 1985.” University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History 13 (2009–2010). Web. Fisher, Jean. “In Living Memory: Archive and Testimony in the Films of the Black Audio Film Collective.” The Ghosts of Songs. The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1986. Ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Liverpool up, 2007. 16–30. Fisher, Mark. “The Land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English Riots.” Web. 27 September 2011. Fusco, Coco. “A Black Avantgarde? Notes on Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa”. Young British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective. Buffalo, ny: Hallwalls/Contemporary Arts Centre, 1988a. 7–22. Fusco, Coco. “An Interview with Black Audio Film Collective: John Akomfrah, Lina ­Gopal, Avril Johnson and Reece Auguiste.” Young British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective. Buffalo, ny: Hallwalls/Contemporary Arts Centre, 1988b. 41–61.

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Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. 1987. London: Routledge, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial ­Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Hemel Hempsted: ­Harvester Whitesheaf, 1993. 222–237. Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.” 1987. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., et al. U of Chicago P, 1996a. 114–119. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” 1989. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., et al. U of Chicago P, 1996b. 210–222. Hall, Stuart. “Song of Handsworth Praise.” Writing Black Britain 1948–1998. An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Ed. James Procter. Manchester up, 2000. 263–264. Howe, Darcus. “The Language of Black Culture.” Writing Black Britain 1948–1998. An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Ed. James Procter. Manchester up, 2000. 264–265. Institute of Race Relations. Deadly Silence: Black Deaths in Custody. London: Institute of Race Relations, 1991. Korte, Barbara, and Claudia Sternberg. Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Marwick, Arthur. A History of the Modern British Isle, 1914–1999. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. May, Trevor. An Economic and Social History of Britain 1760–1990. 1987. Harlow: Longman, 1996. Mercer, Kobena. “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain.” 1988. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994a. 53–66. Mercer, Kobena. “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation.” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994b. 69–96. Pines, Jim. “The Cultural Context of Black British Cinema.” 1988. Black British Cultural Studies. A Reader. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., et al. U of Chicago P, 1996. 183–193. Rushdie, Salman. “Song Doesn’t Know the Score” Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Ed. James Procter. Manchester up, 2000. 261–263. Soja, Edward. W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. 1996. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Solomos, John. Black Youth, Racism and the State. The Politics of Ideology and Policy. Cambridge up, 1988. Van Dijk, Teun A. “Race, Riots and the Press. An Analysis of Editorials in the British Press about the 1985 Disorders.” Gazette 43 (1989): 229–253.

Chapter 2

Resisting Topographies: Immigration, Space and the City in Contemporary British Film Ralf Schneider Abstract Urban space in Britain can be said to offer resistance to the motives and aims of immigrants, while at the same time immigrants develop strategies of resistance towards the spatial constraints the city imposes on them. Approaches to the meaning of space have offered concepts with which the tensions between material spaces on the one hand and the meanings attached to them on the other can be captured. They have also pointed to the importance of the practices of inhabiting these spaces. After a brief discussion of the ways in which migrants relate to urban spaces and a discussion of some theoretical concepts, this chapter will look at three British films that stage and negotiate this two-sided relationship of resistance. In a reading of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things from 2002, Kenneth Glenaan’s 2004 film Yasmin, and Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering from 2006, I will explore the various strategies of spatial coping and the tendencies of resistance and appropriation developed by the migrant characters in the context of the overall spatial semantics established by the films.

Keywords migration – film – urban space – topographical vs. topological space – space vs. place – Yuri Lotman – Michel de Certeau

1

Migrants and the City: Between Accommodation and Resistance

Spatial translocation is a central element of the experience of migration. ­Migrants trying to accommodate in a new society need to cope not only with the ways of life of that society, they are also confronted with unfamiliar locations that the host society partly directs them to, and which they partly seek out themselves, such as housing, the workspace and public spaces. What is more, the majority of immigrants is attracted by urban centres rather than © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_005

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rural areas. Especially for non-white migrant groups, their relationship with urban spaces has been characterised by a number of ambivalences. While the presence of non-white ethnic groups in particular has changed the public face of cities in Britain,1 these groups are, paradoxically, visible and invisible at the same time. On the one hand, the Black and Asian ethnic minorities are perceptible among the predominantly ‘white’ population due to phenotypic difference; at the same time, the clustering of persons from those groups and the sheer population size in the metropolis has also provided a context of anonymity in which the individual blends in with the multitude, a fact of particular relevance for illegal immigrants. While it has been argued that the city provides spaces for encounter in which ethnic diversity is an accepted fact, this seems to be more of an ideal than a lived experience: The freedom to associate and mingle in cafés, parks, streets, shopping malls, and squares, is linked to the development of an urban civic c­ ulture based on the freedom and pleasure to linger, the serendipity of casual ­encounter and mixture, and public awareness that these are shared ­spaces. Diversity is thought to be negotiated in [the] civic public sphere. The depressing reality, however, is that these spaces tend to be territorialised by particular groups (and for this often steeped in surveillance) or they are spaces of transit with very little contact between strangers […]. amin 12

Another ambivalence can be found in housing. A standard narrative of immigration and urban space holds that incoming migrants tend to be channelled into housing areas of ill repute and low quality, leading to the social segregation of ethnic communities in ‘ghettos’ (Phillips, “Black Minority”). While this observation does not lack its empirical basis, current social sciences offer an interpretation of the phenomenon that differs from concepts frequently associated with ghettoisation, such as structural racism, ostracism and the feeling of being cut off from the host society (Robinson and Reeve, ­Neighbourhood). The new interpretation differentiates between involuntary segregation and voluntary self-segregation and has identified some advantages of such ­clusters of immigrant settlement: it appears that for newly arrived ­immigrants ­ethnic clustering, frequently supported by the spatial layout of the estate where they live, can provide an infrastructure of material and immaterial ­support 1 See Winder, Bloody Foreigners and Panayi, Immigration History for historical accounts of ­immigration to Britain.

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on the basis of which self-support can develop; the estate can support the ­maintenance of traditions and kinship networks, and it can, importantly, provide access to economic activity (cf. Vaughan). While certain groups in the host society may intend to separate immigrants from certain neighbourhoods, and thereby create a segregated place for them, immigrant groups themselves might use the place according to their own needs – resisting the strategies of other inhabitants of the city.2 More material examples of changes in the setup of urban places as a consequence of immigration can be found in places of worship that immigrant groups have built: Westminster’s Central Mosque in the heart of the city, the Gurdwara Singh Sabha in Southall and the Shri Swaminarayan Temple in Neasden are three impressive architectural monuments that have added to the public appearance of London the fact that groups with non-English cultural and religious traditions live there. These are only three particularly conspicuous examples from the capital, but Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Muslim places of worship have been created across Britain, sometimes by re-designating houses that were used for other purposes and turning them into mosques, temples or Gurdwaras, a metaphorical and metonymical re-semanticisation of British places.3 Although the long history of racist attitudes and legislation against immigrants has by no means come to an end (cf. Panayi), these examples show that British public spaces have come a long way from the “No Coloureds” signs posted outside pubs or apartments advertised for rent that the Windrush generation was confronted with in the period after the Second World War. In sum, cities may confront immigrants with structures and regulations that resist their plans and motivations and restrict their mobility, but immigrants may develop strategies that serve to resist those structures and regulations. In what follows, I will investigate the various meanings which filmmakers have attached to urban space in movies featuring migrants to Britain. Stephen Frears’ 2002 movie Dirty Pretty Things, Kenneth Glenaan’s Yasmin from 2004 and Anthony Minghella’s 2006 film Breaking and Entering are British films which display a variety of strategies by which immigrants cope with the ambivalences 2 In any case, in spite of the existence of clusters of settlement, there is evidence that with second- or third-generation immigrants ethnic mixing in neighbourhoods across Britain has increased, as has mixing of friendship groups (cf. Finney and Simpson). 3 A comparable example can be found in the extensive grounds and the building of the first Buddhist temple in Britain, the Buddhapadipa Temple established in Wimbledon in 1976. On the drastic changes from inconspicuous prayer rooms to magnificent buildings as an expression of religious diversity in the religious urban geography of Britain, see Peach and Gale, who provide more examples and statistical data.

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of urban space. Before looking at the films, however, I would like to discuss some concepts that help analyse spaces in films dealing with migrants and the city. 2

Topology and Topography, Spaces and Places: Approaches to Urban Spaces and Migrants in Film

Some twenty-five years after the spatial turn, it is unnecessary to dwell at length on the concepts and methods of the cultural analysis of space. Still, it may be expedient to call to mind two influential distinctions proposed by spatial theorists. One is Yuri Lotman’s (Analysis, Structure) time-honoured differentiation between topographical space on the one hand, which comprises the physical features of a space, and topological space on the other hand, which refers to the semantic potential of a topographical space. Topology is made meaningful by acts of semiosis, which are in turn entangled with social, economic, cultural, ideological and political issues. The city provides both topographical and topological spaces for all of its inhabitants. Since the meanings of spaces emerge from cultural negotiations that sometimes look back on long local traditions, however, newly arrived immigrants are confronted with topologies that are not only unfamiliar but may even resist their own attributions of meaning to the spaces in question. The successor generations to the new arrivals in contrast are likely to regard the spaces they have known since childhood as their spaces, even though the host society may still maintain racist prejudices against them being there – the question of ‘belonging’ has a distinctly spatial dimension after all. On the other hand, immigrants may re-interpret spaces they encounter and produce fresh topologies for established topographies; it is particularly the second or third generations of migrant families that charge both urban topologies and their established topographies with new meanings, either by acts of re-semiosis or, as in the case of the places of worship mentioned above, by creating new spaces. Lotman’s differentiation is also useful for film analysis in general, because spaces in film are never mere topographical frameworks for the activities of the characters. Filmic spaces are always also topologies, i.e. spaces and rooms made meaningful, contributing to, and enhancing, the story’s overall semantic potential. Filmic topologies are considerably influenced by film genre. This concerns partly the very fundamental question of setting. The open space of the prairie is a standard location in the Western movie, romance films can hardly do without at least one restaurant scene, and the road movie, the science fiction movie and the heritage movie all feature formulaic arrays of

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places: the road, the spaceship/space, and the country estate, respectively. The semantics of one individual space can shift, according to the genre in which it appears: the private bedroom plays a different role in, say, the romance plot and the horror movie. In the one case it is a space of erotic desire and potential wish-fulfilment, while in the other it tends to function as an endangered space, vulnerable to the intrusion of whatever standard evil the film may contain (stalkers and psychopaths, aliens and monsters, etc.). Cities are frequently used as backdrops for films of the most diverse genres, but just like other filmic spaces, the material city is hardly ever simply recorded. Rather, it is a ‘semanticised’ space, subject to mise en scène, affected by camera angles and movements, lighting, and editing (cf. Kuhn and Westwell, s.v. “filmic space”). What is more, not only is the city as such a place of particular cinematic interest (Clarke); some cities, especially capitals, have cinematic traditions of their own, as is the case, for instance, with Paris, Rome, New York, and London. “As London is a capital city, it has a strong metaphoric and metonymic presence in the cinema, standing variously for England, Britain, the British Empire, the government […]” (Brunsdon 13), but the appearance and functions of London in the cinema are much more varied and polyvalent than that.4 The role which cities play in films about migrants need to be ‘read’ with a view to their symbolic potential and their function in the generic framework of the particular film and in the tradition of cinematic cities. Another approach to space that lends itself well to an analysis of the way immigrants relate to the city is that of Michel de Certeau, formulated as early as 1984 in his The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau takes arrangements of power into account that lend spatial analysis a sociological, political and psychological perspective which was lacking in structuralist-semiotic approaches. What is most interesting in the context of migration and urban space is de Certeau’s differentiation between place and space, strategies and tactics. Place, according to him, is shaped and controlled by those in possession of power and knowledge; these persons and institutions create strategies which regulate and constrain the use of the place. Space, in contrast, is created by individuals occupying and using a place, trying to cope with these constraints by means of tactics. Space, therefore, “is a practiced place” (117; emphasis in the original), and the practices may go against the intentions of those who control the place. It 4 Charlotte Brunsdon’s study from 2007 is an impressively rich survey of the various cinematic appearances of London. Starting from the assumption that “both spaces and texts are cultural productions and should be treated in parallel” (7), Brunsdon examines how the material London and the cinematic London interact, rather than taking the brick-and-mortar (or concrete) city as a given which is then transformed by film.

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is important to note that tactics are the outcome not of open resistance, but of processes of negotiation, of ‘making do’, or ‘poaching’, as de Certeau termed it in connection with the way readers appropriate texts.5 Subtle tactics of appropriation, re-dedication and re-naming may change the significance of space, as practised and experienced by individuals or groups. Resistance can therefore appear in the rather quotidian uses of space. Migrants, as we have seen, can turn into practitioners of place and creators of space. One central distinction, however, must be made with reference to migrants’ experience of space: the freedom to turn place in to practiced place, or space, is severely limited in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, who are subject to state surveillance and control to a much higher degree than immigrants with a work permit and the right of residence. For illegal immigrants, the leeway for resistance against the constraints of urban places is of course even smaller, for though the anonymity of the city presents a sort of refuge for them, the urban space is also pervaded by the constant threat of detection. So far, the study of migratory processes to and from the British Isles in British Literary and Cultural Studies has been at the focus of attention of postcolonial criticism. However, the postcolonial perspective has somewhat blocked other migrations to Britain from view. What we can now call ‘multi-ethnic Britain’ is in fact no longer shaped only by immigration from the Commonwealth, even though the predominance of Asians, Caribbeans and Africans continues (cf., e.g., Eckstein et al.). There are also immigrants and labour migrants, for instance from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Poland and Greece, who form a considerable group among the migrant population of Britain (cf. Salt and Millar; Berkeley, Khan and Ambikaipaker; McDowell). What is more, it seems to have been an unwritten law in postcolonial studies to look exclusively at cultural artefacts produced by persons with an ‘authentic’ migratory background, that is, the immigrants themselves and their descendants; the various phenomena that migration involves have, however, also been dealt with by persons without a migration experience of their own. The fact that recent years have seen an increasing number of novels and films by non-migrant writers and filmmakers dealing with processes of identity formation in the context of migration seems to point to the more general relevance the phenomenon. In the context of multinational migration flows, globalization and transnationalism, it is time for British Literary and Cultural Studies to widen the scope of migration studies to include postcolonial as well as other migration phenomena from all regions of the world and their cultural representations 5 See his chapter on “Reading as Poaching” (de Certeau 165–167).

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in cultural artefacts produced by persons either with or without migration experience.6 3

Migrants in Film as Practitioners of Place and Creators of Space

3.1 Claiming Space: Yasmin (2004) Yasmin, Kenneth Gleenan’s and Simon Beaufoy’s story of a young woman of Pakistani descent, is set in the context of post-9/11 Islamophobic sentiment in Britain. It traces the changing attitude of the title character (played by Archie Panjabi) towards the two spatially separated communities she is part of: the predominantly Caucasian community of the urban world of work and her immigrant Pakistani home community. As in most films, the spatial semantics of the fictional world is introduced in the establishing shots and the exposition. The film opens with images from a suburban context: people going to work in the morning, schoolchildren starting off to school, mothers meeting on the street, shopkeepers starting their business. The image, however, is not that of middle-class white suburbia with semi-detached houses or thatchedroof cottages, but that of a poorly maintained housing area inhabited mainly by immigrant families on the outskirts of a town. The morning ritual of that community includes the morning prayer broadcast via public address from the local mosque, the children and mothers meeting are of dark skin colour, and many people wear shalwar kameez (the traditional South and Central Asian outfit consisting of shirt and pyjama-like trousers), with some additional headscarves worn by the women. In the context of that scenery, the viewer accompanies a young woman, Yasmin, to work: In a series of long to medium shots, we see Yasmin, who has apparently left her house in traditional Muslim dress observing hijab, secretly change into blue jeans and sweater behind a stone wall by the road, getting into a VW Golf cabriolet and driving to work. A long distance shot traces her driving along a Northern English country road, accompanied by a soundscape of off-screen, non-diegetic Oriental music which turns into Western pop from her car radio when she arrives in the city and at work. She works in a care organisation for handicapped children, where she meets her colleague and friend, John (Steve Jackson), with whom she maintains a friendly relationship that never quite reaches the state of a romantic one. As we learn a little later in 6 This is not to deny the influence of Black and Asian literature, or Black and Asian film, which have both successfully fought for a permanent place in the cultural system of Britain; see King on literature, and Korte and Sternberg on film.

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the film, Yasmin has been married to Faysal (Shahid Ahmed), a man from the home community of her family in Pakistan. Yasmin has apparently consented to a marriage that will provide Faysal with a legal residence permit, provided she does not have to consummate the marriage; nor have they developed a relationship of any meaningful kind. The spatial layout of the film focuses on the juxtaposition of a communityoriented out of town living area populated by Pakistani families on the one hand, with the working area of the city, in which Yasmin adopts an almost white, Western habitus, on the other. Both places, then, possess their own ethnic and cultural semantics, and Yasmin travels to and fro between those frames of reference. The film was shot on location in Keighley, but in the film the place is referred to as “Oldley”, which, as Claudia Sternberg observes, “constitutes a blend between Oldham in Lancashire […] and Keighley in West Yorkshire” (Sternberg 82), two towns whose textile industry offered work and attracted large groups of immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh after wwii. In the film, the countryside between Yasmin’s two worlds is a liminal, or transitional space. It can be understood as a stretch of no-man’s land, a non-semiotic area that facilitates Yasmin’s change from the practice of a traditional Muslim woman to that of a British-style employee, and back again. The countryside alongside the road to work, however, is a region of hills and hedgerows, low stone walls and green fields – a place that looks decidedly and prototypically English. The implications may therefore be of a grander scale than a possible connection with West Yorkshire: Britain is shown as a country that comprises these diverse semiospheres. Ultimately, it is the nature of liminal spaces to both separate and connect the adjacent areas, so that the question whether the living area and the working area are connected or not remains inherently unanswerable. Yasmin’s home community is partly pervaded by émigré Pakistani practices and values and partly oriented towards English lifestyles. This concerns not only Yasmin, but also her deeply religious father (Renu Setna), who tries to maintain the traditional position of the patriarch, though as a first-generation immigrant he also has high respect for Britain. Yasmin’s brother, Nasir (Syed Ahmed), is the person who sings the morning prayer in the mosque at the beginning of the film, but he is a petty drug dealer on the side and hangs out with the local girls. Only Faysal is characterised by backwardness: he prefers to sit or lie on the floor, and to cook over an open fire outside in the garden rather than using the kitchen. For Yasmin, the traditional ways are only one side of her identity, connected to the spatial confines of her living area, where she follows the rules of tradition out of respect for her family, doing the housework, caring and cooking for the three men in her family. The film follows an ‘ethnographic’

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approach, drawing on research in immigrant communities in Northern England, including workshops in which the filmmakers and actors met and interviewed members from those communities (cf. Sternberg). The film’s attempts to depict the life of British Asian communities have, however, been criticized for ending up with rather stereotypical depictions of differences between the Western and the Islamic cultures (Jennings 29f.).7 The initial spatial, social and emotional setup changes when a wave of antiMuslim resentment reaches the city after the 9/11 attacks. Yasmin finds herself increasingly excluded and the butt of anti-Islamic jokes; John’s friendship cools down perceptibly, and her employer even asks her to take paid leave until the storm of political emotions has abated. Her husband is arrested upon unfounded charges of terrorism. Yasmin still needs him to sign the divorce papers, so she goes to the police station – in traditional dress – to get the signature, but Faysal has already been transferred to another station. In the first station, Yasmin is mistaken as a foreigner, people speaking to her as if she did not understand English; in the second, she herself is detained in a police cell temporarily. After being released, she waits outside the station for a full day and night, standing there in the public space in her Islamic dress, looking at the city from a changed perspective. Next time she returns to the city, she does so in traditional wear again, meets John by accident and realizes that they have lost connection. Yasmin eventually carries the spatio-cultural semantics of her home community to the city, re-interpreting the place (in de Certeau’s sense) regulated by the white majority and turning into a space in which she has the right to live according to the values of her own community. She claims the public sphere of the city, not only for herself but for an abstract notion of the ­culture of her people. She adds to the place her version of it as a space in which Muslim ways of world-making do not have to appear in disguise. 3.2 Hideaway Stories: Dirty Pretty Things (2002) Dirty Pretty Things is a thriller with a multi-ethnic cast of characters of mostly illegal migrant workers. The film focuses on a new kind of global migration, in which London is represented as a transient area for “illegals”, refugees and asylum seekers, rather than as a home for immigrants from the Commonwealth (Brunsdon 117, Graham 113). Beginning at an airport and ending there, the spatial framing of the film signals this transience. All places in the film 7 Still, the film sides with the Asians: Sternberg points out that the white characters in the film are represented in rather negative terms, especially the policemen who seem to enjoy the freedom of random exercise of power, arbitrary detention and arrest given to them by the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 (Sternberg 84, 88–93).

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carry semantic potential. The protagonist, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a Nigerian doctor who had to flee from false charges of having murdered his wife. He now works as a taxi driver during the day. This activity of crisscrossing the city without arriving anywhere symbolises Okwe’s status in this urban space. To make ends meet, he has another job, as a night porter in the Baltic Hotel. The name of the hotel itself references a non-English place and a multinational region looking back at a colourful past. Okwe is seen in the city in a few scenes, always tired to the point of exhaustion; but most of the scenes are set in the hotel, and many of them in the basement. The thriller genre is always happy to display basements, low ceilings and cold corridors, where it can easily evoke feelings of unease or even danger and entrapment. But the hotel is used as a metaphorical place in more ways than one: it is a place in which people on journeys stop over, whether on business trips or life journeys – as is the case for most employees there. The basement indicates that the immigrants from various countries are slotted into the lowest sector of the labour market, regardless of the social status they enjoyed in their home communities. The basement world of the hotel also suggests that some of the true identities of the persons working there are better kept secret. Finally, the hotel is a very striking example of an urban space in which the private and the public are conflated in a unique way: a hotel is a public place to which people resort for privacy, in which they sleep, use the bathroom, have sex, etc. – activities associated with the privacy of the home. The second protagonist is Senay (Audrey Tautou), a refugee from Turkey, whose legal status forbids her to work. She goes to work nevertheless, as a cleaner in the Baltic Hotel. In the plot line concerning Senay, the private/public space of the hotel is compared to the private place of the illegal ­immigrants and the refugees. While the hotel is almost a hiding place for the immigrants and refugees who find work there, it is also a place that exerts power over them, a surveillance camera controlling their entries and exits when they check in for work. Senay’s private space is also insecure, subject to intrusion and surveillance by the authorities, a private place dragged out into the public, as it were. Senay, after some hesitation, has given Okwe a key for the apartment in which she has been providing him with a place to sleep for some time. One day, however, immigration officers all but raid Senay’s tiny flat, searching all corners, upsetting things and stomping over Senay’s bed in their boots. Privacy and the sanctity of the home, arguably among the most treasured values of the middle classes in Western capitalist societies, is a privilege not to be enjoyed by the refugee. In the scene just described, Okwe makes a narrow escape out of the bathroom window. His presence in the flat being an additional burden on Senay, he moves out again. He is given accommodation, illegally again, by his

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friend, the Chinese doctor Guo Yi (Benedict Wong). Guo Yi works in a hospital mortuary – another workplace in the basement symbolizing the social status and the exploitation of the immigrants, even though he is a certified legal immigrant. When he offers Okwe a place to sleep down there, it appears very clearly that Okwe is not going to stay, but must try to escape from the city: Rather than celebrating the liberatory possibilities and spaces of migrancy in an era of unprecedented global flows of capital, commodities and people, Frears’ film unflinchingly depicts the abject lives of sans papiers: migrants denied the right to stay or work in, but also to leave, the host country. graham 112; italics in the original.

Juan (Sergi López), the concierge of the hotel, is in a position of power over the staff, always being able to report them to the immigration authorities. Juan is also part of the London underworld, not as an exploited labourer, but as a player in illegal games. He abuses the hotel for all sorts of dodgy business, most gruesomely the trafficking in human organs. One day, Okwe discovers a severed human heart in a blocked toilet he is supposed to repair. With the help of ‘Juliette’ (Sophie Okonedo) a prostitute who regularly offers her services in the hotel, and Senay, he uncovers Juan’s ruthless business. Senay has come under pressure from the immigration police and has also had to escape from a clothing sweatshop where she found work but was sexually harassed by the owner – yet another place in which resistance is impossible for the powerless Senay. When making a pact with Juan – her kidney in exchange for a passport – Juan too takes advantage of Senay’s helplessness and insists on taking her virginity as part of the deal. Okwe offers to perform the operation on Senay to make sure it is done properly, on the condition that Juan provides a passport for him as well. When the day of the operation comes, the trio drug Juan, remove his kidney and sell it to Juan’s accomplices. Okwe returns to Nigeria to see his daughter, and Senay makes a new start in New York City. The film stages strategies of ‘making do’ rather than open resistance or appropriation. The situation of the illegal immigrant Okwe and the asylum seeker Senay will not allow more than that. However, they do exploit the structures of the London underworld, metaphorically and metonymically located in the hotel’s basement, hiding and waiting until the opportunity arises for them to continue their life journeys. Through their limited but effective agency, the immigrants turn that area of the city into a ‘placeless place’, situated between the ‘pretty’ neo-liberalist utopia of freedom of movement and limitless opportunities on the one hand, and the ‘dirty’ area of work, in which labourers exploited

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at the lowest end of the income scale are fully controlled, on the other (cf. Whittaker). 3.3 Mastering the City: Breaking and Entering (2006) Anthony Minghella’s last film, Breaking and Entering, stages London as a city “in the throes of physical, economic and social restructuring provoked by political shifts on a European and global scale” (Bird and Luka 81). It juxtaposes the viewpoints of two groups who relate to the same urban space in very different ways, while both pursue the aim of becoming masters over it. One group consists of two of landscape architects, or urbanists, Will (Jude Law) and Sandy (Martin Freeman) and their team. They are involved in planning the transformation of the King’s Cross area, formerly among the most deprived areas in the city and the country as a whole (Bird and Luka 83, and note 1, p. 99). For them, urban space is an object to be shaped, transformed, ameliorated, re-developed and re-designed. Their attempted mastery of the city involves the gentrification of the place. Although they do posit (in an advertising video clip) that the spaces we live in affect the way we feel, their planning shows no regard for the people who inhabit the spaces that are facing utter restructuring. Impressive scale models of the re-developed area take centre stage in the architects’ office, a re-designed dilapidated warehouse that itself indicates the changing use of buildings in a city subject to continuing modernisation. The other group in the film consists of immigrants from Kosovo who have found refuge in London from the Bosnian wars. Among them are fifteen-yearold Miro (Rafi Gavron) and his friends and family. He lives with his mother, Amira, played by Juliette Binoche, in one of those infamous large-scale council-housing complexes (Alexandra Road) that symbolise the 1970s’ socialist utopias of urban life but have faced severe criticism from both architectural and sociological observers (cf. Coleman). To live there, and to live in the city, is not a predicament for Miro, however. He is a traceur, i.e. he engages in the activity of parkour, jumping up walls, skipping over roofs and negotiating fences and other obstacles of that kind with seeming effortlessness.8 Doing so, he practices a form of resistance against the city’s physical materiality, and against the sense of confinement that the immigrant of modest means may experience in a capitalist city like London. The traceur converts the concrete 8 On parkour, see also Laughlin (“The Materiality of Parcour”) and Kidder (“Parcour”). Jeffrey Kidder argues that young people’s engagement with virtual realities, as e.g. in computer games, in which material obstacles can be surmounted with great ease, is one source of inspiration of the traceurs. The practices of movement through real urban space is thus affected by digital media environments.

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(in a double sense) topography of the city into a topology associated with mastery and freedom. Miro is also involved with a group of burglars and dealers of stolen goods from his own ethnic group. When the gang pick Will and Sandy’s office for their next ‘job’, Miro accesses the roof of the office building to spy, through the glass roof, on the cleaning staff entering the code that activates and deactivates the burglar alarm. He breaks into the office, deactivates the alarm and opens the door for the burglars, receiving one of the stolen laptops as a reward. The loot triggers a relationship of sorts between Miro and Will. Miro is obviously fascinated by the architectural project, and on the stolen computer he finds the marketing video clip in which Will advertises his and Sandy’s project, as well as private photos of Will and his family. After the gang breaks into the office for a second time, Will decides to lie in wait for the burglars himself and catch them in the act. One night he discovers Miro climbing up and down a façade and follows him home. Miro has intruded Will’s workspace, as well as his private life through the possession of the private photos on the computer, and Will now enters Miro’s private space. First he provides Amira, who works as a tailor, with work, and then begins an affair with her. In one scene he leaves his business card in Miro’s room to signal to the boy that he has made him out as the burglar. The film shows urban space as a site of competition for mastery. The city planners create places, Miro and his friends interpret the city as a playground and a territory to explore and exploit. Minghella points to the economic implications of the different approaches to the city: the film suggests that the legal acquisition of a high-end computer is out of the question for the youths of immigrant descent; at the same time, the financial loss suffered by the architects is minimal in comparison with the money they are going to make by restructuring the city. The King’s Cross/St. Pancras area suffers from the activities of architects and criminals alike. And more damage occurs in the private places in that film. Will’s private life is endangered by the difficult relationship with his partner, Liv (Robin Wright Penn), and her daughter; his house is metaphorically burgled through Miro’s possession of the photos; Amira’s and Miro’s flat is entered by Will, and Will is being secretly filmed having sex with Amira, so that he can be blackmailed later – another violation of privacy. The film ends, somewhat unsatisfactorily, with Will confessing his affair to Liv, the two of them exonerating Miro in the legal procedures following his arrest by the police, who also find him out, and Miro and Amira retuning to Sarajevo. Will makes a new start with Liv and little Bea. As in Dirty Pretty Things, London is a station on the way of migrants, rather than a permanent home in this film. It is left open whether a stray fox on the streets at night, which recurs a leitmotif in the film, is going to be a permanent inhabitant. Like other immigrants,

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the fox is a stranger in the city. Indeed, most people in the film are – only a police detective investigating the burglary is from the King’s cross area, and he is not at all excited about its reconstruction. The city is an unnatural environment for the fox, but the fox appears to be able to survive in that place. It resists and overcomes – like the immigrants? – the destructive and limiting forces of the metropolis. 4

Conclusion

Immigrants and urban space are related to each other in ambivalent ways. First, the places controlled by the authorities restrict and constrain immigrant life and movement; second, the city is subject to acts of resistance and appropriation by immigrants, which turn the places into spaces of their own definition. In the three movies analysed, migrants are shown as practitioners and creators of space, but with different emphases and varying success. In Yasmin the protagonist’s acknowledgement of her cultural heritage, fostered by the anti-Islamic mood after 9/11, puts an end to her attempts to blend in with the ‘white’ context of the city. She eventually brings the habits and attitudes characteristic of her home place to the public space of the city. In Dirty Pretty Things, the metropolis is both a refuge for immigrants and a place in which legal and illegal immigrants are exposed to repression and exploitation; in that film, the only way to escape being slotted into the lowest ranks of urban dwellers socially, economically and legally, is to leave the city. Breaking and Entering presents the city as a contested area, in which immigrants find ingenious and sometimes criminal ways of mastering the spaces that city planners regard as material they can mould. The film also highlights the economic discrepancies between the affluent in charge of the city and the immigrants aiming at coping with the urban surroundings. The city as presented in film is never a neutral setting, and the analyses have attempted to show that filmmakers are aware of the ambivalences, dangers and injustices that urban space keep in store for persons who have come to the city but are not welcomed as belonging there. Works Cited Primary References

Breaking and Entering. Dir. & Scr. Anthony Minghella. uk/usa, 2006. Film. Dirty Pretty Things. Dir. Stephen Frears. Scr. Steven Knight. uk, 2002. Film. Yasmin. Dir. Kenneth Gleenan. Scr. Simon Beaufoy. uk, 2004. Film.

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Research Literature

Amin, Ash. Ethnicity and The Multicultural City: Living With Diversity. (Report for the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions and the esrc Cities Initiative.) Durham: U of Durham P, 2002. Berkeley, Rob, Omar Khan, and Mohan Ambikaipaker. What’s New About New Immigrants in Twenty-First Century Britain? York: Rowntree, 2006. Bird, Lawrence, and Nik Luka. “Arts of (Dis)Placement: City Space and Urban Design in the London of Breaking and Entering.” Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 21.1 (2010): 79–103. Brunsdon, Charlotte. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Clarke, David B., ed. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge, 1997. Coleman, Alice M. Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing. London: Shipman, 1991. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dwyer, Claire, and Caroline Bressey, eds. New Geographies of Race and Racism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Eckstein, Lars, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Christoph Reinfandt, eds. MultiEthnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Finney, Nissa, and Ludi Simpson. ‘Sleepwalking to Segregation’?: Challenging Myths about Race and Migration. Bristol: Policy, 2009. Graham, James. “Postcolonial Purgatory: The Space of Migrancy in Dirty Pretty Things.” Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011. 112–128. Jennings, Tom. “Same Difference?” Variant 23 (2005): 28–31. Kidder, Jeffrey L. “Parkour: The Affective Appropriation of Urban Space, and the Real/ Virtual Dialectic.” City & Community 11 (2012): 229–253. King, Bruce. The Internationalisation of English Literature. Oxford up, 2004. Oxford English Literary History Vol. 13: 1948–2000. Korte, Barbara, and Claudia Sternberg. Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford up, 2012. Laughlin, Zoë. “The Materiality of Parkour.” Actions: What you Can Do with the City. Ed. Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2008. 40–43. Lotman, Yuri. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Trans. D. Barton Johnson. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976.

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Lotman, Yuri. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1977. McDowell, Linda. “On the Significance of Being White: European Migrant Workers in the British Economy in the 1940s and 2000s.” New Geographies of Race and Racism. Ed. Claire Dwyer and Caroline Bressey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 51–64. Panayi, Panikos. An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800. Harlow: Pearson, 2010. Peach, Ceri, and Richard Gale. “Muslims, Hindus, And Sikhs in the New Religious Landscape of England.” Geographical Review 93.4 (2003): 469–490. Phillips, D. “Black Minority Ethnic Concentration: Segregation and Dispersal in Britain.” Urban Studies 35 (1998): 1681–1702. Robinson, David, and Kesia Reeve. Neighbourhood Experience of New Immigration: Reflections from the Evidence Base. York: Rowntree, 2006. Salt, John, and Jane Millar. “Foreign Labour in the United Kingdom: Current Patterns and Trends.” Labour Market Trends, Oct. 2006. 335–355. Sternberg, Claudia. “Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004).” Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. Ed. Lars Eckstein, et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 79–95. Vaughan, Laura. “The Spatial Foundations of Community Construction: The Future of Pluralism in Britain’s ‘Multi-Cultural’ Society.” Global Built Environment Review 6.2 (2007): 3–17. Whittaker, Tom. “Between the Dirty and the Pretty: Bodies in Utopia in Dirty Pretty Things.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14.2 (2011): 121–132. Winder, Robert. Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain. London: Little Brown, 2004.

Chapter 3

Heterotopias as Spaces of Resistance in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) Katrin Röder Abstract This article provides a description, close reading and analysis of Salman Rushdie’s heterotopian spaces in Midnight’s Children, especially of the Methwold Villa, the detention centre in Benares and of the colony of communists and magicians in Delhi. It probes into the formation of novel spaces as well as novel notions of resistance in acts of writing, storytelling and interpretation. The article demonstrates that some of the most interesting spatial practices of resistance in Midnight’s Children are characterized by a high degree of resilience.

Keywords heterotopia – cultural hybridity – plenitude – deiXis – resistance – resilience – tensegrity – ambiguity – ethnic cleansing – ethnic absolutism – multitudiousness – alternative realities – magic realism – cultural difference – globalization – provincialization – fundamentalism – direct democracy – anarchism – fanaticism – parrhesia

1

Introduction

A great number of city spaces in Rushdie’s novels (above all Bombay and Delhi, but also London and New York) have been described as heterotopias1 by Nandini Bhattacharya (283), as spaces of “teeming multitudiousness” by Stuti Khanna (22), as palimpsests by Cecile Sandten (141) and as vivid

1 Among Foucault’s examples for heterotopias are prisons, theatres, cinemas, gardens, brothels, ships and colonies (Foucault 1986: 24–27).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_006

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spaces of plenitude2 by Carmen Concilio and Andreas Höfele. According to Homi K. Bhabha, many of Rushdie’s city spaces are characterized by a high degree of cultural hybridity.3 In addition, Rashmi Varma has discussed the representation of Bombay as a space of resistance in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Varma 76–78). In the following, I seek to show that the heterotopias in Midnight’s Children (above all the Methwold Villa in Bombay which harbours the Midnight Children’s Conference, the detention centre in Benares and the colony of communists and magicians in Delhi) participate in a “simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (Foucault 1986: 24). They represent “alternative realities” and generate hybrid notions of political opposition which are based on the principle of direct democracy (Rushdie 2006: 300). In this way, they defy binary oppositions of left and right, of centre and margin, of dominance and oppression, of progress and reaction and of strength and weakness. In Sections 7 and 8, I will show how heterotopias like the detention centre in Benares and the colony of communists in Delhi in Midnight’s Children become spaces of resistance during the State of Emergency. It is important to note that not all city spaces in Rushdie’s novels are spaces of plenitude or of “teeming multitudiousness”. Some of them, e.g. Karachi in Midnight’s Children, are defined by practices of ethnic cleansing and “ethnic absolutism” (Dawson 128). In the following, the spaces of multitudiousness will be discussed in connection with ethnically-cleansed spaces in the novel. In Midnight’s Children, which was described as a work of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon 64–65), the historian-narrator Saleem does not only record and shape the empirical realities but also the “alternative realities” of Indian history from the beginning of the 20th century until 1978 (Rushdie 2006: 300). The heterotopian practices in the novel are shaped by Rushdie’s narrative strategy of magic realism which constructs “the plural, multiple possibilities” that postcolonial cities can generate over time (Khanna 22). The heterotopia, Foucault writes, “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are incompatible” (Foucault 1986: 25). In Midnight’s Children, heterotopias are not only characterized by a juxtaposition of “incompatible” 2 For this notion see Deleuze 1992 and Deleuze 2003. Russell West-Pavlov described spaces of plenitude as “undermining all clear boundaries”, as “setting up a panorama of fluidities” and as eschewing “the structuralist notion of difference” (2009: 239). 3 Rushdie uses the term hybridisation to describe the generation of migrant identities in The Satanic Verses which defy binary conceptions of self and other, centre and margin or dominance and submission (Bhabha 224–225).

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sites but they also combine heterogeneous and often contradictory values, ideologies, philosophies and beliefs. In the following, I seek to show that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia can productively be combined with Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity which dares “a move” into the “interstices” and “in-between spaces” of cultural difference (2). Both conceptions are related to spatial, cultural and hermeneutic practices in which incompatible spaces, times, ideas and values are brought together. In the spatial practices of cultural hybridity, differences are not erased or merged to produce sameness, uniformity and predictability. They can be integrated and kept alive to generate new life conducts and notions of identity as well as new political philosophies and new conceptions of political opposition. Thus, the conceptions of heterotopia and cultural hybridity imply cultural, spatial as well as hermeneutic practices in which newness can be brought into the world and through which cultures as well as city spaces can regenerate themselves (Bhabha 212–235). 2

Cosmopolitan Hybridity in Rushdie’s Novels

Contemporary critics still regard Rushdie as “a doyen of cosmopolitan hybridity” (Dawson 125). According to Rashmi Varma, his texts “resist both the globalizing narratives of capital and the provincializing narratives of rightwing nationalisms” (79). For Ashley Dawson, however, The Satanic Verses from 1988 explores “the conditions that generate fundamentalist assertions of identity” and shows “that diasporic experience generates forms of political bifocality that are just as often conflictual as they are hybrid” (Dawson 125). Rushdie’s earlier novel from 1981, Midnight’s Children, can certainly also be described in this way, yet at the same time, it is full of deep, complex and vivid urban spaces which are characterized by tensions but in which characters are sometimes comfortable with ambiguity. In Midnight’s Children, this description fits Bombay, especially the Methwold Villa, and Delhi, above all the colony of communists, magicians and street performers in the slum. The Bangladeshi community in London, a city within the city, a “city visible, but unseen” in The Satanic Verses, is another example of a vivid space of plenitude (Höfele 50–54). The heterotopias in Midnight’s Children are signifiers which inspire ongoing “practices of signification” (Kunow 372). They are, as Rüdiger Kunow has argued, “signifiers in waiting, with their meaning constantly changing, postponed” (372) but they do not provoke an evaporation of meaning (Barthes 1132). Instead, they invite dialogue and discussion, that is, they inspire

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multiple readings and constant processes of revision, as Saleem, the narrator, emphasizes at the end of the novel (Rushdie 2006: 643). My intention here is neither to idealize the city spaces in Rushdie’s novels nor their empirical counterparts in which their dwellers are afflicted with poverty, bad health conditions, extremist terror and the social injustices of the caste system but instead to show their semantic complexity and to ask what cultural relevance these spaces might have today in India and all over the world. Whereas some readers have maintained that Midnight’s Children is ­pervaded by cultural pessimism because it ends with the disintegration of the main protagonist and narrator Saleem, Rushdie has argued that the novel also expresses “the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration”: This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it “teems”. The form – multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight of Saleem’s personal tragedy. I do not think that a book written in such a manner can really be called a despairing work. (1991: 16) The fact that Midnight’s Children was adapted as a film by Deepa Mehta in 2012 gives further proof of its lasting cultural significance and potential for political provocation in terms of its critical portrayal of Indira Gandhi’s government.4 At this point, we can only speculate what the film’s long-term effect on the Indian and global audiences will be at a time when the cosmopolitan Bombay Rushdie describes has turned into a “provincialized” space as some cultural historians maintain, a space ruled by the right-wing Hindu party Shiv Sena which strives to turn the multi-ethnical metropolis into a sacred space reserved for Hindus (Varma 76–83).5 Perhaps the film may remind audiences what city spaces like Delhi and Bombay (but also Western migrant cities like London and New York) are about to lose through acts of fundamentalist violence and ethnic cleansing. 3

Bombay: The Methwold Villa

After Independence and in the decade of optimism which followed, that is, at the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s dreamscapes of India 4 See “Ban for Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight Children’” [sic]. 5 After the terror attacks and massacres in 1992 and 1993, thousands of Muslims fled the city (Varma 76).

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as a secular socialist nation state, Bombay became a growing, multi-cultural and cosmopolitan metropolis with many Muslim migrants and migrants from the rural areas in the south of India (Clemens 112–118). Midnight’s Children looks back to the very beginning of Bombay. The novel shows that the space on which the city is built was reclaimed from the sea in the 19th century. Thus, Bombay is created as a space of colonialist desire: “Seven Isles” were turned “into a long peninsula” by the use of “tetrapods and sunken piles” (Rushdie 2006: 121). In the novel, Bombay is still growing: Saleem’s father Ahmed invests in concrete tetrapods which reclaim more and more land from the sea (Rushdie 2006: 244). The Methwold Estate is the home of Saleem and his family between 1947 and 1962. It is a fictional place with empirical references. It is set close to Warden Road, the place where Rushdie lived with his family in his youth ­(Rushdie 1991: 277; Concilio 135). Before Independence, the estate belonged to William Methwold, an Englishman who is probably Saleem’s biological ­father. He constructed it as a heterotopia, as a “mimic England in urban India” ­(Bhattacharya 276). After Independence, it is re-invented and redefined by its new owners through their creative spatial practices of mimicry (Rushdie 2006: 125–127). In the course of the political changes which led to Independence, William Methwold, the descendant of the man who “had the idea of building this whole city” (Rushdie 2006: 128–129), sells his Villa for “ridiculously little” under the condition that its structure (that is, its deep space structure of a Roman mansion) and interior decoration are retained (Rushdie 2006: 128–129). After Independence, the Methwold Villa harbours people from different classes and with different occupations: Dr. Narlikar (a gynecologist and businessman), Homi Catrack (a film magnate), Adi Dubash (a nuclear physicist), Navy Commander Sabermati and Ismail Ibrahim (a lawyer) as well as a number of servants like the Catholic convert Mary Pereira or the disgraced servant Musa who openly complains about social injustice and exploitation. He is dismissed for stealing a silver spittoon but his ghost continues to haunt the Villa (Rushdie 2006: 199–200). The Villa is a home for people with different ethnical, religious and social backgrounds, for Muslims, Hindus and Christians. Its new owners even get along with us Americans in their neighbourhood. For a certain time, they turn the Villa into a comparatively peaceful postcolonial cosmopolitan space (Rushdie 2006: 128–130). Ten years after Independence, the Methwold Villa comes to harbour the forum of the Midnight Children’s Conference and thus becomes the city space in which an all-Indian intercultural dialogue can constitute itself.

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The Midnight Children’s Conference

The Midnight Children’s Conference (short mcc) forms itself in the space of Saleem’s head who, at the age of nine, becomes aware of his magic gift of telepathy. There is also a more down-to-earth biological or medical explanation of his talent which is related to Saleem’s problems with his paranasal sinuses. At the age of nine, Saleem learns that he can communicate with the other children born close to the hour of Indian Independence and Partition. They speak different languages, come from many different places and castes and have different confessions, but after a first language confusion or “polyglot frenzy” Saleem can communicate with them on the level of thoughts, not words (Rushdie 2006: 232–233). One might expect that the mcc is independent of city spaces, that it exists wherever Saleem goes, but this is not the case: in the novel, city spaces are defined by spatial practices of deiXis,6 that is, the inhabitants act on and create the spaces in which they live through their practices of signification but spaces also act on their inhabitants. At first, Saleem is unable to control or make use or sense of the voices in his head. To probe into his talent of telepathy in secret because his father thinks it is a sign of madness or religious fanaticism, S­ aleem flees into an old clock tower in Bombay. The tower temporarily becomes a place of anarchist resistance: its former sound of “tick-tock”, which had symbolized British disciplinary power as well as the countdown of the British rule in India, is replaced by the countdown “tick-tock” of a bomb: Joseph D’Costa, a communist anarchist who complains that “[t]his independence is for the rich only; the poor are being made to kill each other like flies” (Rushdie 2006: 121, 139), hides his explosive powder in the tower and is found out by the police (Rushdie 2006: 139, 201–203, 238–239). His line: “‘I am the tomb in Bombay […]. Watch me explode!’” is appropriated by Saleem himself at the end of the novel, it rhymes unevenly with Saleem’s exclamation “I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode […]” (Rushdie 2006: 241, 647). Saleem’s gift of telepathy and the use he makes of it are strongly influenced and immediately related to the city spaces of Bombay. In the old clock tower which symbolizes colonialist power and anarchism, he is torn between the radical and contradictory self-images of a powerless, passive receiver and victim of overwhelming voices and thoughts on the one hand and of a manipulator of others’ thoughts on the other hand (Rushdie 2006: 241–242). At the end of his phase of manipulative megalomania, Saleem comes to see himself both 6 For a definition of deiXis see West-Pavlov 2010: 5–6.

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as a receiver and transmitter of thoughts and voices, he combines both selfimages in his role as “All-India Radio” and as the founder and leader of the mcc (Rushdie 2006: 230, 242). On his 10th birthday in 1957, Saleem selects the Methwold Villa as the space in which he founds the mcc, a direct democratic forum which enacts the freedom of speech and of opinion (Rushdie 2006: 287). The same, readers may suspect, would not have been possible in other city spaces of the novel like the clock tower or in the “grotesque”, unreal, uncanny, “flat”, facade-like Karachi in Pakistan, the “city of mirages; hewn from the desert”, which Saleem contrasts so decisively with “the highly-spiced non-conformity of Bombay” (Rushdie 2006: 428, 430). After Saleem’s family settles in Karachi, where his parents are later buried under the bricks of their newly-built house during a bomb attack in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 (Rushdie 2006: 474), he finds that he cannot communicate with the members of the mcc across the border. In the fundamentalist police state Pakistan, his progressive, democratic gift of telepathy degenerates into a sniffing-out of others’ secrets and desires (Rushdie 2006: 427–428). The mcc can be described as a heterotopian practice through which, during midnight hours, Midnight’s Children from all over India who, like Saleem, have received idiosyncratic magic powers, can communicate (295–296, 314). The magic powers of these children represent “alternative realities” and symbolize India’s new and unique historical situation after Independence (Rushdie 2006: 300): It was as though […] history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time. rushdie 2006: 271.

The forum of the mcc is partly inspired by Nehru’s post-Independence optimism and by his secular dreamscape of a unified, socialist and democratic nation state in which individuals overcome (or repress) selfish desires as well as cultural differences and devote themselves to a higher “third principle” which supports the unity of the nation (Varma 71). The integrative forum of the mcc is founded in opposition to and against the background of the language marches of 1956 which caused violent riots and led to the construction of ethnicallycleansed spaces, that is, to the separation of the state of Bombay in 1960. In addition, it is founded against the background of the second general elections in India which were won by Nehru’s Congress Party but which provoked the

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fear of national disintegration because of the increase of Communist seats in parliament, turning the Communist Party into the “largest single opposition party” (Rushdie 2006: 274–277). 5

The Philosophy of the mcc

The mcc is highly ambiguous with regard to its ontological status: Readers may wonder if they can believe in the alternative reality projected by the mcc, in its magic powers and its political philosophy, not only because Saleem as a narrator and leader of the mcc is characterized by his enormous nose which might signify a tendency towards lying. The story about the Midnight’s Children might be read as a dream because the children were born and communicate around midnight, or as a “fraud, deception and trickery” (Rushdie 2006: 272–273, 315). In great part, the ambiguous quality of Saleem’s story of the Midnight’s Children is created by Rushdie’s narrative strategy of magic realism. It opens a deep hermeneutic space in the novel which provides room for the narrative dialogue between Saleem and Padma, his spouse. In Padma’s reaction which we read alongside Saleem’s narrative, we hear a sceptical response to Saleem’s story. Yet Saleem puts great effort into his defence of the mcc’s cultural value and significance: Padma is looking as if her mother had died – her face, with its openingshutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. “O baba!” she says at last. “O baba! You are sick; what have you said?” No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing what I’ve unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-mymother’s-head truth. Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. rushdie 2006: 277–278.

The ambiguous character of the MCC also extends to its progressivism: Midnight’s children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, ­twentieth-century

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e­conomy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind. No: illness is neither here nor there. rushdie 2006: 277–278.

The mcc can be read as a critique of and alternative to Nehru’s parliament or as a caricature of Nehru’s democratic idea of the unified nation state which was betrayed by Indira Gandhi’s totalitarian regime, by her cheat in the general election of 1971 and her violation of civil rights during the State of Emergency between 1975 and 1977. The tensions which inform the mcc do not subvert its status as a heterotopian practice, on the contrary: they contribute to its value as a semantic innovation. In Midnight’s Children, the Methwold Villa and Bombay as an artificially created solid city space may not only be described as heterotopias but also as tensegrities.7 A tensegrity is a flexible and stabile structure which connects and integrates impertinent parts through tension and compression. Donald Ingber, a cell biologist, argues that the “architecture of life” can be described as a tensegrity structure (48). In Midnight’s Children, the mcc resembles a tensegrity structure because it re-organizes and stabilizes itself through the forces of tension and compression which work between its members. Because of the tension and pressure which exist between its members and their political interests, the mcc is no perfect, flawless forum of equality, truth or of parrhesia or fearless speech (Foucault 2001: 11–19): its leader Saleem is guilty of a selfish act of betrayal (he cheats Shiva, his rival, out of his birthright), the mcc as a whole tends to ignore (like Nehru’s secular socialist nation state) rather than to integrate confessional difference, it strives to translate individual and cultural difference into a new hierarchy of magic powers, and yet, to Saleem, it represents “the very essence of multiplicity” and thus also of direct democracy (Rushdie 2006: 317). It manages to stabilize and re-organize itself by encouraging peaceful as well as conflict-laden dialogues between opposing interest groups. All in all, the mcc is a strange, hybrid, unique and novel combination of equality (a “loose federalism”) and hierarchy (Rushdie 2006: 275, 305). It strives to integrate progressive as well as almost reactionary ideologies. Its novel and unique quality is not derived from particular ideologies and beliefs but resides in their unprecedented assembly, connection and integration:

7 Tensegrity is a portmanteau word created from “tensional integrities”. The notion was coined by Richard Buckminster Fuller.

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[…] among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism – “We should all get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?” and individualism – “You say we; but we together are unimportant; what matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good” – filial duty […] and infant revolution […] capitalism […] and altruism […] science […] and religion […] courage – “We should invade Pakistan!” – and cowardice – “O heavens, we must stay secret, just think what they will do to us, stone us for witches or what-all!”; there were declarations of women’s rights and pleas for the improvement of the lot of untouchables; landless children dreamed of land and tribals from the hills, of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of power. […] Nowhere, in the thoughts of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves […]. rushdie 2006: 316–317.

Saleem argues that the mcc acquires its meaning when it is interpreted as a site of resistance during the State of Emergency between 1975 and 19778: […] we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight’s Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed. rushdie 2006: 317.

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The Gradual Disintegration of the mcc

The disintegration of the mcc is due to internal dissent and external pressure. It is synchronous with the demolition of the Methwold Villa for which there are a number of reasons, among them a murder committed among its inhabitants (Rushdie 2006: 362–363). In its aftermath, some families run into financial problems and they have to sell their property because they need cash (Rushdie 2006: 366–370). The estate is bought by the rich heirs of Dr. Narlikar who dislodge the former owners, demolish the old villas and build a more profitable apartment-skyscraper on the very spot (Rushdie 2006: 412).

8 During the State of Emergency which followed the peaceful protests against Indira Gandhi’s fraud in the elections of 1971, J.P. Narayan, Raj Narain, Morarji Desai and many other protest leaders were immediately arrested. Organizations and political parties which opposed government measures were banned (Gupte).

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On a macro-historical level, Saleem relates the disintegration of the mcc to the beginning of the Sino-Indian war in 1962. All in all, the disintegration of the mcc has internal, personal as well as external (macro-historical) reasons: Saleem mentions his own distraction and his selfish exclusion of Shiva (his rival) who is named appropriately after the Hindu god of destruction and rejuvenation (Rushdie 2006: 392–393). However, he also blames the other children’s selfish concerns which are buttressed by Shiva’s aggressive ideology of egoistical individualism and materialism and which make them forget the sense of community which had defined the mcc (Rushdie 2006: 354–355). Saleem regrets the dissent arising from ethnic, religious and ideological conflicts among the children, which are provoked by their parents’ influences and which reactivate old notions of hatred. Above all, he regrets the Midnight Children’s loss of belief in the cultural relevance and potency of the mcc: When novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue. […] In this way the Midnight Children’s Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the passive-literal mode was at work, although I railed against it […]. rushdie 2006:352, 354.

Finally, it is Saleem’s move to Pakistan which disconnects him from the rest of the mcc. 7

Benares: The Widow’s Hostel

After a long time in which Saleem was disconnected from the Midnight’s Children during his stay in Pakistan, the mcc is re-united under arrest in Benares or Varanesi, an ancient city and a sacred space for Hindus in India (Rushdie 2006: 604). In Midnight’s Children, the “Widow’s hostel”9 in Benares, a heterotopia of deviation (Foucault 1986: 25), is the place where the government detains Saleem and a great number of members of the mcc during the State of Emergency. The detention of Indian opposition leaders during Emergency, among them Morarji Desai, the later Indian Prime Minister, is by now a wellestablished historical fact (Klieman 1981: 247). Saleem, at the time living in the colony of magicians and communists in the slum of Delhi, is imprisoned during Sanjay Gandhi’s violent act of slum cleansing in 1976 and is forced to betray the names of the members of the mcc. Thus, 9 The Widow is Indira Gandhi.

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he reunites the mcc by an act of betrayal and the Widow’s Hostel becomes a dark mirror of the Methwold Villa (Rushdie 2006: 606). In a paradoxical practice of space reading, Saleem turns the Widow’s Hostel for a short and last time into something new, into a space of resistance and (this time truly) into a space of parrhesia: here, communicating with the Midnight’s Children through the walls, Saleem does not only admit his acts of betrayal but he also expresses hope before the Widow crushes it: Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without disagreeing […] are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow, by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants […] because what can they do to us, now that we’re all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious prejudices […]! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she’ll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don’t know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we’ve won! Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. […] whispering through the wall came […] the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic: she had cut it out of us. rushdie 2006: 607–610, 614.

Saleem is released, with many other political prisoners, at the end of the State of Emergency in March 1977 (Rushdie 2006: 616). 8

The Moving Slum of Delhi

What is the fate of the heterotopias in Midnight’s Children? The slum colony of magicians and communists in Delhi, modelled after the authentic Kathputli colony of magicians, puppeteers and street performers which was located around the Turkmen Gate and the Friday Mosque, is a heterotopia which is characterized by a high degree of resilience10 in the novel. The colony’s notions 10

The term resilience refers to the ability of complex social, biological, political, ecological and economic systems “to withstand perturbations without losing any of its functional properties” (Washington 11). The notion “represents the capacity of a system to cope with disturbances without shifting into a qualitatively different state. A resilient system has

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of political opposition are almost as heterogeneous and hybrid as those of the mcc because of its many communist splinter groups (Trotzkyists, Maoists, nationalists, internationalists and many more), but the colony is held together for a certain time by the integrative power of Picture Singh, their invincible patriarchal leader, who carries a magic umbrella which restores peace among conflicting groups (Rushdie 2006: 554–560). Midnight’s Children shows how the colony is dissolved during Sanjay Gandhi’s violent acts of ethnic cleansing in 1976 during the State of Emergency, but it also shows that it is not destroyed. It becomes a mobile space of resistance, that is, the “moving slum” of Delhi which turns up in different parts of the town and departs before the police arrive: […] they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians’ ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there, they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty. Informers said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh’s Mughal observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill […]. rushdie 2006: 602–603.

After the State of Emergency, the colony occupies a new place in the city, a little further westward than before around Shadipour bus depot. The stories of the slum of Delhi and of Picture Singh are left unfinished in the novel (Rushdie 2006: 618, 638). The real Kathputli colony of magicians still exists (although not as a colony of communists but as a colony of puppeteers and street performers) in the centre of New Delhi. At present, “Kathputli Colony is the first slum in the city that will undergo in-situ redevelopment by the Delhi Development Authority (dda) with the help of a private developer” (Sunny). In January 2017, only 900 of the 2,800 cabins were occupied (Sunny). Many residents of Kathputli Colony mistrust the authorities and resist the plans of the dda. the capacity to withstand shocks and surprises, and if damaged to rebuild itself. Hence resilience is the capacity of a system to both deal with change and continue to develop” (Washington 11).

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Residents who were relocated complain about the inadequate size of the new flats (especially large families), about instances of violence and the loss of jobs (especially women). The new city grew around and enclosed it, but it is always under threat of dissolution because its space is sought after by the city government which wants to turn it into a high-profit space for investors (Teicher; Kattakayam). 9

Conclusion

After the dismantling of the Methwold Villa and the destruction of the mcc in Benares, the alternative realities and notions of resistance connected with these places teem anew in the high-profit skyscraper built by the Narlikar heirs on the spot of the Methwold Villa. Although the apartment spaces in the Narlikar tower are narrower than in the Methwold Villa, they prove deep enough to harbour the narrative dialogue between Saleem and his spouse Padma. It is the space in which Saleem finds the peace and the rest (and his immediate audience) to write his history of India and where, as he says, the “chutnification” of history takes place. In the Narlikar skyscraper, Saleem preserves the moments of historical possibility, the memory of alternative realities and of spatial practices of resistance, of their failure as well as their revival and regeneration (Rushdie 2006: 642). To conclude: In Midnight’s Children, the heterotopian practices of resistance are actualised and kept alive through a dynamic process of storytelling which is defined by practices of narrative ­“revision” (Rushdie 2006: 643). They open the text for ongoing processes of “refiguration” which are carried out in creative acts of reading and adaptation (Ricoeur 53). Works Cited “Ban for Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight Children’” [sic]. Entecity.com. EnteCity, 11 Dec. 2012. Web. 25 October 2017. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Philadelphia, pa: Harcourt, 1992. 1130–1133. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bhattacharya, Nandini. “A City Visible but Unseen.” Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practices/Ecritures d’une nouvelle ère/aire. Ed. Kathleen Gyssels, Isabel Hoving and Maggie Ann Bowers. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 273–285. Buckminster Fuller, Richard. “Tensegrity.” Portfolio Art News Annual 4 (1961): 112–127.

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Clemens, Jürgen. “Bombay: Polarisierung in Indiens größter Stadt.” Großstädte 97.2 (1997): 112–118. Concilio, Carmen. “The City as Text(ure): Bombay in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet.” The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet. Ed. Elsa Linguanti and Viktoria Tchernichova. Pisa: ets, 2003. 129–149. Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27. Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. Gupte, Pranay. Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi. London: Penguin, 2012. Höfele, Andreas. “Wasteland Sprouting: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Cityscapes of Modernism.” Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands: European essays on theory and performance in contemporary British fiction. Ed. Richard Todd and Luisa Flora. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 41–54. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Ingber, Donald E. “The Architecture of Life.” Scientific American 278.1 (1998): 48–57. Khanna, Stuti. “Art and the City: Salman Rushdie and His Artists.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37.4 (2006): 21–43. Klieman, Aaron S. “Indira’s India: Democracy and Crisis Government.” Political Science Quarterly 96.2 (1981): 241–259. Kunow, Rüdiger. “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream: Salman Rushdie.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 51.3 (2006): 369–385. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative i. Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. U of Chicago P, 1984. Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin, 1991. 9–21. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 2006. Sandten, Cecile. “Phantasmagorical Representations in Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004).” Commodifying (Post)Colonialism. Ed. Rainer Emig and Oliver Lindner. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 125–146. Sunny, Shiv. “Kathputli Colony residents ‘slum’ it for a better future.” The Hindu.com. The Hindu. 9 Jan. 2017. Web. 25 October 2017.

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Varma, Rashmi. “Provincializing the Global City: From Bombay to Mumbai.” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 65–89. Washington, Haydn. Human Dependence on Nature: How to Help Solve the Environmental Crisis. London: Routledge, 2013. West-Pavlov, Russell. Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. West-Pavlov, Russell. Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Chapter 4

Changing Uses of the City in Contemporary Black British Novels Merle Tönnies and Anna Lienen Abstract This essay traces the development of spatial patterns from the traditional Bildungsroman and the male and female variety of the ‘black British Bildungsroman’ to the ­novels about the ‘black male underclass’. Particular emphasis is given to the ideological ­re-evaluation of both the journey motif and the city as a space of growth.

Keywords Bildungsroman – black British Bildungsroman – journey motif – black male underclass – spatial patterns – Andrea Levy – Monica Ali – Bernadine Evaristo – Courttia Newland – Alex Wheatle

1 Introduction In the realm of black British literature, the most dominant novelistic form of the 1990s was probably the ‘black British Bildungsroman’ (cf. Rupp 8) with its appropriation of a traditional western genre for very different purposes. The features and varieties of this phenomenon have been analysed in numerous publications, and the exact terms used to designate it vary, depending on the author’s focus. Mark Stein’s seminal Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation for instance prefers to foreground the transformative effect on British society, while the name ‘black British Bildungsroman’ emphasises the detailed characteristics of the texts. One also has to note that in addition to the most well-known works where a male writer describes the development of a male protagonist, there is a ‘female’ variety which modifies important traits of the ‘male’ form. On the other hand, a rather different kind of black British novel began to appear already in the 1990s and especially after 2000 which focuses on processes of exclusion and marginalisation and has so far not received a lot of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_007

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attention in secondary literature. The present paper will compare these novels about the ‘black1 male underclass’ with the more established form of the black British Bildungsroman in both of its varieties, paying special attention to the uses of space (and particularly of city spaces) in the construction and representation of the protagonists’ identities. The classical Bildungsroman, the features of which black British writers appropriated and modified in the 1990s, shows a very clear-cut spatial structure, based on the central motif of the hero’s journey: He (and traditionally the Bildungsroman indeed only had male protagonists) travels from his familiar surroundings to new spaces, especially to a big city (see also the characteristic features listed in Iversen 378), and is thereby enabled to grow as a person and find his place in the world. Spatial movement visualises character development here, and once this has been completed, the hero is able to return to his original geographical surroundings and live there as a fully integrated member of society. Spatially, the protagonist thus comes full circle in the end in a highly symmetrical pattern, while metaphorically he has successfully completed a goal-oriented unidirectional process. 2

City Spaces in the Male and Female ‘Black British Bildungsroman’

When black male writers began to adopt this form in the 1990s, the hero’s journey was one of the elements that they adapted. These writers specifically left out the “return to the fold” (described by Stein 23 as a feature of the classical Bildungsroman) which originally worked to confirm the protagonist’s development. Most typically, the spatial movement is no longer a temporary ‘journey’ (see Sommer 113) but involves the character moving from the provinces or from suburbia into (the centre of) a big city, especially London, either for good or for an extended period. There, he begins to interact more directly with (white) British society than in his familiar surroundings, but in contrast to the traditional Bildungsroman, spatial movement does not correspond to an unproblematic developmental process. The protagonist is torn between various 1 With regard to the ‘black male underclass’ the meaning of ‘black’ moves away from the political umbrella term as which it has often been used (cf. Hall 163). The literary representations discussed here mostly feature characters with Afro-Caribbean background who have been born and raised in Britain, and it is with this group in mind that the term ‘black’ is used here. While this definition of ‘black’ is less heterogeneous, the novels’ depictions of the ‘underclass’ are far from homogeneous (even including minor white characters who live in similarly precarious circumstances as the protagonists).

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identity constructions which are offered to him by different social groups. In the representative case of Shahid in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album from 1995, this for instance involves the role of his white middle-class tutor Deedee’s hedonistic lover and that of a Muslim fundamentalist held up by Riaz and his group. The character’s wavering, which usually continues until the very end of the novel and is sometimes not even decided then, is represented spatially by the different places which are associated with the identity positions in question and between which the protagonist literally moves back and forth in the course of the plot. Thus, his insecurity about his identity is mapped on to the city (or on two different cities and the journeys back and forth between them, as e.g. in the case of Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black of 1996), and the wellordered and closed spatial pattern of the traditional Bildungsroman cannot establish itself any longer. The second variety of the black British Bildungsroman – written by a woman and focusing on female experiences – typically features two instead of one main character, and this of course also affects the use of space. The two protagonists start out in a similar position (usually as members of the same family) and then develop in diametrically opposed ways.2 One of them manages to grow in a manner that is very similar to the classical Bildungsroman, while the other one takes a downward course. The first protagonist gradually finds her place in British society and uses education as a key means in this process. Indeed, she often encounters rather conventional guides and mentor figures (cf. the “educator(s)” and “companion(s)” listed among Iversen’s key features [377]) as well, who help her on her way. Spatially, her development is mirrored directly in a linear movement from the margins to the centre, usually from out-of-the-way London estates either to the central parts of the metropolis (as in Nazneen’s appropriation of the city in Monica Ali’s 2003 Brick Lane) or to spaces associated with social prestige and economic well-being like a Southern English proverbially middle-class city in Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere from 1996.3 Despite some remaining problems and misgivings, the sense of having arrived and succeeded is much more pronounced here than in the male black British Bildungsroman. It is thus only logical that the plot element of the protagonist’s final return to her childhood home at best appears as an uncomfortable brief visit, as when Levy’s Vivien feels completely out of place on the council estate where her mother lives (cf. Levy 274). Ali’s Nazneen even pointedly decides against the return to Bangladesh planned by her husband; 2 For a more detailed analysis of the female ‘black British Bildungsroman’ see also Tönnies. 3 Cf., however, Frank (96–97), who reads Levy’s novel according to the plot model of the picaresque instead of the Bildungsroman because of the characters’ lack of self-awareness.

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these women have reached the destination of their journey into British society and do not need any confirmation of their development by their original social set, although the novels also acknowledge the pain involved in leaving part of their family behind in this way. This ambivalence and the focus on new chances and possibilities which nevertheless prevail in the end is mirrored paradigmatically in Vivien’s perception of space in Canterbury, where she has finally found her place in Britain as a student at art school, living in a very nice room with a view. It is clear for her that her sister cannot be allowed into this space: I looked out of the window at the sun setting over the sea. It was leaving a beautiful, impossible sky-blue pink horizon. But as I thought of Olive in my flat, in my life here, a grey cloud drifted across the scene. ‘No, you can’t [stay with me],’ I said. ‘There’s no room.’ levy 270

The size and openness of the living space that Vivien has gained is highly significant, as is the fact that she is now able to look directly out to the sea, with all the associations of traditional Englishness this space was already given in works like Richard ii.4 In this ‘beautiful’ vision of the future there is indeed no ‘room’ for Olive, far beyond the literal sense of the word which Vivien first uses as a lame excuse, before she shouts explicitly: “I don’t want you here – don’t you understand – just leave me alone!” (Levy 271). Even before this callous outburst, it is clear that the novel does not idealise Vivien’s new position – after all, the sun is not rising but setting in her view of the sea, i.e. there is still a lot of darkness ahead of her. Indeed, the novel emphasises the isolation into which her process of growth has at least momentarily led her: after the telephone conversation with Olive, she finds out that her boyfriend Eddie, about whom she has become increasingly embarrassed in her new life, has left her, taking all his things: “It [Eddie’s guitar] had gone too. He had gone. I sat on the floor in the still and quiet of the empty flat and looked out at the horizon. I was alone” (Levy 271). Despite her sense of loneliness, however, Vivien is still looking at the horizon (an almost proverbial image of new perspectives), and her new friends have after all only gone to the pub, leaving her a note to come and join them.

4 At the very end of the novel, Vivien indeed claims traditional Englishness rather than Britishness for herself in a much-quoted statement, thereby taking the final step away from her social origins: “My family are from Jamaica [… b]ut I am English” (Levy 282).

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The clear-cut and teleologically oriented spatial and developmental pattern which a protagonist like Vivien follows in the course of the plot is qualified by the second main character’s life, so that the overall effect of the female black British Bildungsroman is more balanced than it may have seemed so far. This second woman’s outlook is even bleaker than the typical situation of the male writers’ heroes discussed above, because from starting on the margins of both the city and British society she goes through a whole row of experiences of discrimination and exclusion, usually ending up even further away from the centre than before. As Vivien’s sister Olive comments, these characters are “never far from nowhere” in Britain (Levy 273). Significantly, Olive takes this observation, which gives the novel its title, to apply to Vivien as well as to herself, and this expectation of being automatically marginalised on ethnic grounds is as important as her real experiences of racism in keeping her stuck in a social ‘nowhere’ in Britain. Indeed, she initially has the same opportunity as Vivien to encounter potential mentor figures, as the two girls attend the same grammar school in Islington, but Olive sees the institution as foreign ground rather than a chance to transcend her current social status. Spatially, her lack of positive development is reflected in a basically stationary position. Although she does come into contact with new spaces beyond the housing estate to which the family moved during the two girls’ youth (especially the South London area where her boyfriend Peter lives) and even manages to obtain a flat of her own in a different part of London at some point, she can never establish herself securely anywhere else. Instead, she is always seen to return to her mother’s flat, from which she desperately wanted to escape in the beginning. This stagnancy becomes even more obvious through the narrative construction of the novel, because Olive’s failed spatial movements are directly intercut with Vivien’s successful ones. Most explicitly, Olive finally ends up wanting to move even further away from the centre of British society by going ‘back’ to her parents’ country, Jamaica. As it is clear that she is thinking about an imaginary rather than a real space here (a stereotypical sunny ‘homeland’ with beaches and an easy-going, open-minded population), the reader may well expect yet another vain attempt at self-realisation – if she puts her plan into practice at all. Just like Vivien’s life story, the personal and spatial course Olive takes in the novel is highly representative of the female black British Bildungsroman in general. The ‘second’ character in Ali’s Brick Lane, Nazneen’s sister Hasina, for instance stays in Bangladesh and is increasingly stigmatised by society, being relegated to ever more marginal spaces and in the end literally becoming invisible (by running away with a fellow-servant). As with Olive, readers will probably not expect this last attempt at carving out a space for herself to be successful. Similarly, in Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara (first edition 1997, second

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edition 2009), the title character’s father, Taiwo, who plays the role of the contrastive foil here, never reaches a secure position in British society and takes his sense of exclusion out on his children. Lara herself, on the other hand, is ready to move on to a bright future in Britain at the end of the novel, so that insurmountable exclusion and seemingly unstoppable progress are once again opposed to each other. Thus, the female black British Bildungsroman leaves the reader with an ambiguous overall image of the city (and especially the metropolis – London, and also Dhaka in Brick Lane), showing it as a space which both offers and frustrates developmental chances and efforts. 3

Literary Representations of the ‘Black Male Underclass’

In contrast to both the traditional and the black British Bildungsroman in its two versions, the novels by and about the ‘black male underclass’ constitute a less canonised and somewhat neglected group of works. The controversial term ‘underclass’ refers to a group that is fiercely debated by scholars from opposing ideological beliefs. The literary representations of the ‘black male underclass’ deal with characters who live in precarious circumstances. These ­novels depict an even less linear plot development than both varieties of the black British Bildungsroman and show a definite lack of teleology. This might be due to the absence of alternative spaces available to the (predominantly male) ‘underclass’ protagonists as they are hardly able to leave their own inner-city area. So, despite their geographically central position, the characters are excluded from mainstream society. The novels, thus, break with the established spatial development that is at the core of both aforementioned varieties of the Bildungsroman and create an atmosphere of hopelessness and confinement instead. Movement, if possible, resembles a downward spiral which represents the tragic fate of the protagonist. Interestingly, the novels about the ‘underclass’ mainly focus on male characters and their problems within the ‘underclass’. The female characters are not only less prominent, but also seem to be more easily able to transcend their class background and be accepted by mainstream society. One female character comments on this problem by arguing that “[t]his is still a racist society and in it black women are tolerated more than black men” (Wheatle 209). This does not mean that female members of the ‘underclass’ do not struggle at all (the novels show that as well),5 but the texts emphasise the difficulties 5 While the protagonists’ girlfriends can be considered a driving force behind the young men’s wishes to transcend the ‘underclass’, minor female characters tend to confirm stereotypical

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of creating a positive male gender identity in a job-, money- and powerless situation such as that of the ‘underclass’. It could be argued that the ‘black male underclass’ experiences the impact of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ (as discussed, among others, by Brittan 1989, Clare 2000, Connell 1995, Horrocks 1994, MacInnes 1998) particularly strongly in their class environment. It should be noted that in the novels of the ‘black male underclass’ there is also a striking absence of (male) guardian figures typical of the Bildungsroman. In each of the three novels about the ‘underclass’ discussed here the protagonist’s father has either left the family, died or his physical disability undermines any notion of strength and guidance. Other possible guardian figures, such as Jah Nelson in East of Acre Lane and The Dirty South or Sam Boyd in The Scholar, either cannot prevent the young men’s downfall or, in the case of Levi in The Scholar, turn out to be ‘fake’ and, in fact, contribute to their demise. As the novels take on the narrative perspective of the ‘black male underclass’ protagonist, the reader is made to share the experiences and problems this particular group encounters and, as a result, is potentially made to sympathise with the ‘underclass’ despite (probable) class differences. The existence of a group referred to as an ‘underclass’ and the factors contributing to its existence is a much debated phenomenon shaped by opposing ideological beliefs. The most controversial figure in this debate is the American researcher Charles Murray, who famously asked: “How contagious is this disease [the ‘underclass’]? Is it going to spread indefinitely, or will it be self-containing?” (Murray, “The British Underclass” 20). His fiercely contested approach defines the ‘underclass’ through three behavioural criteria, namely, “dropout from the labor force amongst young males, violent crime, and births to unmarried women” (Murray, “Ten Years Later” 26). While M ­ urray highlights individual responsibility, researchers at the other end of the political spectrum such as William Julius Wilson (who focuses on the United States) and John Rex (who works on the ‘underclass’ in Britain) emphasise how certain structures within our society contribute to the creation of an ‘underclass’. In The Ghetto and the Underclass Rex summarises the findings of his research on the ‘underclass’ by stressing the circumstances in which many immigrants live: to be in the less desirable parts of the labour market, to be concentrated in inferior and largely segregated housing, and to attend schools which notions about the ‘black female underclass’. Cf., however, Immonen (93–116), who discusses the negative depictions of women in Wheatle’s novels with regard to the author’s personal background.

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[are] becoming increasingly segregated, and in which they [are] denied equality of opportunity […] they [find] themselves overall in an ‘underclass’ position. (112–113) It lies beyond the scope of this paper to take this challenging debate further; however, when dealing with the fictional representation of this group it is worthwhile keeping these opposing positions in mind as the characters reflect on the reasons for their marginalised status and sometimes even seem to ‘answer back’. Also, in order to indicate the controversial status of this topic, the term ‘underclass’ is placed in inverted commas here. For the novels, a central point from the above debate is the poor housing conditions (as highlighted by Rex) and their impact on the formation of an ‘underclass’. The literary representations of the ‘black male underclass’ depict run-down housing estates enclosed in an atmosphere of hopelessness, situated in poor inner-city areas from which the characters cannot escape. The social exclusion of the ‘underclass’ is illustrated by the fact that the characters are hardly ever able to leave their neighbourhood (cf. also Cuevas 210–217, Immonen 93–116), whether it is the fictional Greenside Estate (Cuevas 210 locates the fictional estate in White City) in Courttia Newland’s texts or a very realistic depiction of Brixton in Alex Wheatle’s novels. In fact, if one locates the various streets and council estates referred to in Wheatle’s work on a map, one gets the feeling of an extremely limited (almost insular) space within which the characters live. If they ever move away from their inner-city district, this movement (in contrast to the Bildungsroman) does not contribute to a positive development. On the contrary, these new spaces practically throw the characters back into their respective inner-city area where they are swallowed by the vortex of the ‘underclass’.6 3.1 Deconstructing the Journey Motif This decisive break with the traditional journey motif is clearly illustrated in Courttia Newland’s 1997 debut novel The Scholar: A West Side Story. The novel (which shares some similarities with Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere) depicts the development of two cousins: while Sean, the eponymous ‘Scholar’, tries to escape from the Greenside estate through education, his cousin 6 If one considers the downward development of the characters, the novels about the ‘underclass’ can be considered negative Bildungsromane (as in Cuevas 216). However, the fact that the characters cannot move from one space to another (as, for instance, Hardy’s Tess does) but are repeatedly thrown back into their original inner-city area sets the novels apart from the Bildungsroman genre.

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Cory has already joined the ranks of the ‘underclass’. However, and that is the difference for instance from Levy’s Bildungsroman, none of them is able to escape from the ‘underclass’ but both end up being “lost to the darkness too” (Newland 344). One might even argue that Cory drags Sean down into the depth of the ‘underclass’. While Cory’s demise is something the reader might expect, Sean’s downward development holds the attention for the whole novel. Due to various circumstances, Sean helps Cory out by taking part in an armed robbery for which he leaves his familiar London district. The beginning of the journey is still reminiscent of the traditional Bildungsroman. As Sean is the focaliser in this part of the narrative, the reader shares his experience of this ‘new’ world he encounters: Sean saw the street lights, red buses and black cabs disappear – a new and foreign world reared its head in sharp contrast to the West London estate he’d been raised on. He vowed to himself he would travel a great deal more […]. newland 155

There are glimpses of the idea that this journey might open up new horizons for Sean as it would do in the traditional Bildungsroman. He is curious about this new space, but his vow to see more of the world is swiftly followed by a condition: “[…], if he got himself and Cory out of this mess” (Newland 155). This is where the journey motif starts to break, as the armed robbery offers no escape from the ‘underclass’, but, in fact, marks Sean’s way into it. After the robbery has taken place, the narrative stresses the conflict between Sean’s auto-image as the ‘Scholar’, who tries to be different and for whom criminal actions are not ‘natural’, and the stereotyped notions other people have of him: Before today, he hadn’t robbed, mugged, rioted, or taken part in any of the numerous crimes people believed were natural for boys of his colour and age. He’d spent his whole life trying to prove to himself he was different. And now, circumstances and the environment he lived in, rather than a conscious decision had forced him to become a participant in an act completely against his nature. But had white people noticed his difference, today, or at any other time in his life? ‘No,’ Sean thought angrily. newland 170.

The quote highlights the conflict between the individual who actually wants to escape from the ‘underclass’ and the overpowering mainstream society

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(consisting of white people only). The rhetorical question at the end encourages the reader to consider Sean’s point of view. As the public’s stereotyped conceptions of him, based on his skin colour and (we might assume) his choice of clothing, are impossible to break, Sean cannot “come into representation” (Hall 164). His attempt to succeed through education is not recognised. Consequently, he decides to resort back to the “politics of resistance” (Hall 163) after the robbery by consciously constructing his identity against white middle-class ideas of achieving social mobility: So why should I bother to be different? Why should I care? Sean thought to himself, as the car wound its way smoothly. He stared at the gun-grey sky and the bored faces of the motorists around him. Seeing them stare back at him, just the same as they always had, he couldn’t think of one single reason to be different, anymore. newland 170

Sean’s thoughts illustrate the complex conflict between one individual’s attempt to be different and the pressures of an all-powerful society. His autoimage seems to be overpowered by the flashbacks he has after the robbery of “the looks on people’s faces, in the street in the shop and on the country road, shouting, pointing and cursing at him” (Newland 169). White people (as representatives of mainstream society) seem to be not only unaware of but also uninterested in looking beyond their stereotypical notions of black youths. One could argue that Sean is trapped between the ‘underclass’ and mainstream society, not really belonging to either group. As his attempts to be accepted by the latter are unsuccessful, he decides to stop struggling against the undertow of the former. Since he can no longer muster the energy to fight against the overpowering heterostereotype of the ‘black male underclass’, the only other available option seems to be to join its ranks. This conflict delineates the interplay between the opposing positions in the ‘underclass’ debate. On the one hand, by living on a council estate and attending a state school Sean already lives within certain structures that Rex considers to contribute to the formation of an ‘underclass’. On the other hand, the dispute after the armed robbery concerning whether or not Sean is a “natural” (Newland 173) can be read as playing with Murray’s concept of behavioural criteria. While Sean strongly objects to this notion, Levi and his accomplices repeatedly voice their belief in his talent as a “natural getaway driver” (Newland 176). Sean’s success in the robbery eventually triggers his thought process about joining Levi’s illegal and violent schemes. The temptation to earn substantial sums of money in a comparatively short time, in particular, makes

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him contemplate the idea more seriously. As Sean reconsiders the financial problems of his mother as well as the general run-down state of his environment, becoming a member of Levi’s gang – thereby meeting Murray’s criterion of “violent crime” (26) – actually appears to be a more immediate way to escape poverty and deprivation than his studies. The Scholar depicts an individual making choices, but these choices are motivated by the surrounding structures. In doing so, the text positions itself against behavioural positions such as Murray’s, highlighting the structural influences instead. While the novel gives the reader a direct insight into the reasons for Sean’s decision, it is far from glorifying the result. Instead, it emphasises how difficult it is to choose the right path in a situation such as his without becoming “lost to the darkness too” (Newland 344), as Sean is in the end.7 3.2 The Impossibility of Resisting the Vortex of the Inner-City Area By contrast, the main character Dennis in The Dirty South from 2008 – despite living in Brixton – is not really a member of the ‘underclass’. It is quite important to him to break with stereotypes about Brixton when he addresses his fictive (white middle-class) addressees at the beginning of the novel: Before all you know-it-all pussies start thinking that this is the story of some young black guy who didn’t know his paps and lived in a Brixton ghetto – you’re wrong. Yeah, I lived in Brixton, or Bricky as we call it. But in a nice street. Leander Road, just behind Tulse Hill estate. Bricky does have decent streets but with all that fuckery stereotyping and media shit, you well-booted living in Berkshire and wherever wouldn’t know that. wheatle, East of Acre Lane 1–2

While Dennis emphasises that he lives in a “nice street”, the proximity of Tulse Hill estate (and the connotations a council estate might evoke in the reader) partly disrupts his positive description of Brixton. In fact, although he has a more stable family background with both parents employed and recognising the value of education, what Dennis really longs for is to not be the ‘odd one out’ among his fellow pupils. While he is aware of the dangers of drug dealing, proving that he is not a “pussy and a spoilt little rich kid” (Wheatle, The Dirty South 51) is more important to Dennis and he therefore joins the business together with his friend Noel. Dennis’ descent into the ‘underclass’ starts when 7 Cf. also Arana (93), who stresses that not all characters in The Scholar are doomed from the start but also chose wrongly.

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he goes to neighbouring Peckham and is beaten up by a group of youngsters there. It is through this ‘failed’ journey that Dennis becomes caught up in the vortex of the inner city. The loss of reputation as well as masculinity that is caused by the beating forces Noel and Dennis to seek revenge in order to reestablish their street credibility. It is through their violent revenge attack that Dennis finally considers himself “a badman” (Wheatle, The Dirty South 56). As with Sean in The Scholar, Dennis’ involvement in “violent crime” (Murray, “Ten Years Later” 26) can be used to categorise him as a member of the ‘underclass’ according to Murray. Yet, one has to bear in mind that Dennis’ actions are above all prompted by the wish to gain the respect of his peers. First of all, Dennis’ move to Peckham and the beating that ensues highlights the extreme friend-enemy structure that exists between different districts despite their close spatial proximity. As one of Dennis’ attackers exclaims: “‘Who’s he think he is? A Brixton shotta coming down our ends and he wasn’t even packed. Man, that was a proper easy jack.’” (Wheatle, The Dirty South 36). But when Dennis and Noel return from their revenge attack, it is Noel’s respect that means everything to Dennis and finalises his descent into the ‘underclass’, outweighing the critical voices of his parents: I went to bed that night feeling as content with myself as I could remember. I had proved myself in front of Noel and he wouldn’t dare call me a spoilt little rich kid again. In a corner of my mind there was this little picture of Paps, Mum and Granny wagging their fingers saying we didn’t grow you like that… But it couldn’t spoil the feeling I had, the feeling of being a badman. wheatle, The Dirty South 56; emphasis in the original

It is interesting how characters as different as Sean and Dennis eventually both become part of the ‘underclass’. While Sean tries to escape from the Greenside estate against all odds and make a better future for himself and his girlfriend through education (thereby conforming to middle-class ideals of social mobility), Dennis seems to have the better prospects. He does not live on a council estate, nor does he live in a single parent family troubled with unemployment, but all these presuppositions seem to be irrelevant as the only thing Dennis wants is the respect of his peers. Again, the conflict between individual and society becomes apparent: Dennis has all the things the ‘underclass’ lacks according to Murray, yet, he still joins it as the influence of the structures surrounding him (maybe even Brixton as such) is stronger. Another novel by Alex Wheatle which deals with the aspect of power and spatial movement is East of Acre Lane from 2001. In one of the subplots, the

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minor character Coffin Head is arrested and taken to an unknown police station where he is beaten up by the police. Coffin Head’s example illustrates the importance of being in control of spaces as well as movement from one space to another in the conflict between the ‘underclass’ and the police as representative of hegemonic state power. The realisation that he has “no idea where he [is] being taken” (Wheatle, East of Acre Lane 105) creates a feeling of helplessness, and the anger and frustration about his treatment, especially the beating, stir up a wish for revenge in him. Coffin Head’s decision to purchase a gun in order to defend himself leads him on a journey to Rotherhithe – an area strongly inaccessible to him due to his ethnicity. This is vividly expressed on the linguistic level by street names such as “Albion Street” (Wheatle 147) or, as his friend Sceptic comments “Dey should call it black-people-don’t-belong street” (Wheatle 147). So yet again, this journey is not a positive one that might support the character in finding a place within society. Rather, it consolidates his position in the ‘underclass’ as he obtains a weapon that might be used to commit a “violent crime” (Murray, “Ten Years Later” 26). Moreover, the move does not open up new horizons but confirms most strongly through the depiction of space how the characters can never truly ‘belong’, how certain spaces are already by linguistic definition inaccessible and uninhabitable. As all three examples above demonstrate, if the characters move, they do not encounter wide open spaces that welcome them (as they are in one way or another always alien to the spaces they move to), but they are forcefully thrown back into the inner-city area they have come from which pull them into the depth of the ‘underclass’. 3.3 Council Estates as Spaces of Oppression and Resistance Instead of moving, the ‘underclass’ is supposed to stay within its respective council estate, whose function is explained in The Scholar as follows: “Many black families found themselves housed in Greensides all over England, tucked away with the lower-class whites, where the middle and upper classes didn’t have to see them. (Newland 37).” Thus, the use of space can be regarded as an expression of hegemonic power relations. In Newland’s and Wheatle’s novels, the council estate becomes a hostile environment, a space of confinement and oppression with which the destiny of the characters is inevitably intertwined. As the above quote highlights, the function of the council estate is to “[tuck] away” (Newland 37) undesired parts of society. That is why it comes as no surprise that one council estate in the novels is named “The Prison” (Wheatle, East of Acre Lane 68) by the inhabitants due to its apparent lack of windows. By linking council estates to prisons – thereby alluding to the disciplining

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character Michel Foucault ascribes to the latter – the novels emphasise their function of silencing and marginalising the ‘underclass’ through hegemonic state power. Other very visual descriptions underline the notion that the city and the council estates in particular can no longer be considered spaces of growth in these texts. Looking inward rather than outward – continuing the idea of the windowless prison –, the buildings for instance include “a path that offer[s] no view outside the estate and [is] hardly touched by the sun” (Wheatle, East of Acre Lane 27). In contrast to the sunset depicted towards the end of Never Far from Nowhere, any sort of happy ending is out of the question here. In fact, as nothing can grow in such an environment, there is no life either. This image is continued when another estate is compared to a “ghost town” (Newland 126). Since these lifeless environments seem devoid of inhabitants, the buildings themselves become alive. Images of war resonate in the description of “rows of buildings standing like some concrete army that had invaded the area and was awaiting further orders” (Newland) and support this life-threatening atmosphere. This emphasises the function ascribed to the council estates in the texts as controlling and excluding the ‘underclass’ from mainstream society. At the same time, these examples stress the strong connection between spaces and identity construction. Obviously, the dominant atmosphere has an impact on the inhabitants. These spaces take away any feeling of humanity or compassion as they turn people against each other, and survival becomes the primary aim. In The Scholar, Sean notes that the only person he sees on his trip to another estate is “a black girl pushing a pram, her head straight and her eyes as unseeing as a soldier on parade” (Newland 126). Knocking on one of the apartments’ doors in this “ghost town” (126), Sean then encounters “a large half-caste girl with a baby in one hand and a cricket bat in the other” (126). Both examples illustrate the conflict between humanity (in the children the young women look after) and the need for survival and self-defence that the environment creates. On the one hand, the spaces in the novels are structured and mapped out by the characters, disclosing various subjective geographies (cf. Barrell 99); on the other hand, the characters’ spatial origins influence their auto- as well as hetero-image. For example, in The Dirty South Dennis traces Noel’s street knowledge back to his council estate background: “I’ve never heard of this lacing shit. Noel should know though, he lives in Tulse Hill estate” (Wheatle, The Dirty South 8). Similarly, the hostility towards the police, who are considered the greater enemy, is also related to different spatial positions. For instance, Dennis explains after a violent attack in which his friend Noel was killed:

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“I ain’t gonna tell him [a police officer] a fucking dog! He probably lived in somewhere like New Malden. Fuck him and his mum!” (Wheatle 176). It seems that as the characters do not inhabit the same space, they cannot find a common ground on which they can communicate or co-operate. Yet, the police as the common enemy does not create unity among the ‘black male underclass’ either. Rather, it complicates conflicts within the ‘black male underclass’ further by opening up a second line of conflict. 4 Conclusion In comparison to the traditional as well as the black British variety of the ‘Bildungsroman’ where the city centre is portrayed as a space of growth, the novels about the ‘black male underclass’ depict an ideological re-evaluation of the city as a space of resistance: a space that challenges the characters to resist the undertow of the ‘underclass’ and to fight against each other, against a predominantly white middle-class and against the way they are represented by hegemonic state power. Yet, real (political) resistance that might be enabling is impossible at the same time. As a result, the novels about the ‘black male ­underclass’ break with the established journey motif as the characters are hardly able to move beyond their respective inner-city area. Those few journeys that are made do not contribute to a positive character development, but result in the characters’ downfall. In their journeys the young men experience spaces which they cannot inhabit but which throw them back into their original city district, confirming their ‘underclass’ status more than ever. The city as represented in these novels is no longer a desirable space that invites people to find their place in society. On the contrary, council estates feature as hostile environments which are used by the hegemonic state power to lock away undesirable parts of society. The people living there are turned against each other in their struggle to survive and therefore become unable to resist in a coordinated way. The novels, thus, position themselves against intrinsic approaches to the ‘underclass’ debate like Murray’s and highlight the influence of the structures created by society. The narrative perspective of the ‘underclass’ shows how difficult it is for individuals to make the right choices in an environment like this. Therefore, these novels should not be read as reinforcing stereotypes of black male youths or a glorification of drug dealing and violence. On the contrary, they draw the reader’s attention to the social conditions surrounding the ‘underclass’ and criticise that these dominant power structures create a situation where people live in the geographical centre and remain excluded at the same time.

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Works Cited Primary References

Abdebayo, Diran. Some Kind of Black. 1996. London: Abacus, 2001. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. London: Black Swan, 2004. Evaristo, Bernadine. Lara. 2nd ed. London: Bloodaxe, 2009. Kureishi, Hanif. The Black Album. 1995. London: Faber, 1996. Levy, Andrea. Never Far from Nowhere. London: Headline, 1996. Newland, Courttia. The Scholar: A West Side Story. 1997. London: Abacus, 2001. Wheatle, Alex. East of Acre Lane. 2001. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Wheatle, Alex. The Dirty South. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008.

Research Literature

Arana, Victoria R. “Courttia Newland’s Psychological Realism and Consequentialist Ethics.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 86–106. Barrell, John. “Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex.” The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990. Ed. K.D.M. Snell. Cambridge up, 1998. 99–118. Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Clare, Anthony. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. London: Chatto, 2000. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Cuevas, Susanne. Babylon and Golden City: Representations of London in Black and Asian British Novels since the 1990s. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979. Frank, Tobias. Identitätsbildung in ausgewählten Romanen der Black British Literature. Genre, Gender und Ethnizität. Trier: wvt, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. Houston A. Baker, et al. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 163–172. Horrocks, Roger. Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, Realities. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Immonen, Johanna. “Brixton Experience: Black Britishness in the Novels of Alex Wheatle.” Critical Engagements: A Journal of Theory and Criticism 1.2 (2007): 93–116. Iversen, Anniken Telnes: Change and Continuity: The Bildungsroman in English. Diss. U of Tromsø, 2009. N.p. 2009. Web. 30 Dec. 2013. MacInnes, John. The End of Masculinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Modern Society. Buckingham: Open up, 1998. Murray, Charles. “The British Underclass.” Public Interest 99 (1990): 4–28. Murray, Charles. “The British Underclass: Ten Years Later.” Public Interest 145 (2001): 25–37.

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Rex, John. The Ghetto and the Underclass. Aldershot: Avebury, 1988. Rupp, Jan. Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature, Trier: wvt, 2010. Sommer, Roy. Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des Zeitgenössischen Interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: wvt, 2001. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature. Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State up, 2004. Tönnies, Merle. “Feminizing a Classical Male Plot Model? Black British Women Writers and the ‘Bildungsroman’.” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 24.1 (2013): 51–61. Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Part 2 Social Class

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Chapter 5

“Poor is Cool”: The Working-Classes as Myth in Pulp’s “Common People” Christoph Singer Abstract Britpop-band Pulp’s most successful album A Different Class is mostly concerned, as the title indicates, with questions of class-constructions. The song and the respective music video “Common People” deal with the dynamics surrounding gentrification, the motivations and problems that arise when the well-off move into low-income areas. This paper argues that song and video deconstruct the song’s female character perception of the poor as “cool” as a myth in Barthes’s sense. At the same time the male character’s self-image as a member of the working-classes is equally grounded in mythical social signification. The use of several spaces in “Common People” illustrates the ambiguous nature of class-constructions and their semantic codes.

Keywords Roland Barthes – Jean Baudrillard – Pierre Bourdieu – Cornelius Castordiadis – Susan Sontag – Pulp – Britpop – gentrification – London – new labour

1 Introduction “Mis-Shapes, mistakes, misfits. Raised on a diet of broken biscuits, oh we don’t look the same as you. We don’t do the things you do, but we live around here too” (Pulp, “Mis-Shapes”). In 1995 the Britpop band Pulp released their most successful album entitled A Different Class, which, as the title suggests, deals predominantly with questions of class and related identity constructions, stereotypes and auto-stereotypes. Where the very first song “Mis-shapes” calls attention to the realities and aspirations of society’s outsiders, the song ­“Common People” is concerned with the problems such attention can cause. While the song does not deal explicitly with gentrification, it certainly addresses one of the motivations that draw richer citizens into low-income areas: namely the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_008

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wish to slum it, to experience the ‘real’, the ‘rough’ and the ‘raw’ life. According to Christian Lander, author of the satirical blog Stuff White People Like, white people love situations where they can’t lose. While this does account for the majority of their situations, perhaps the safest bet a white person can make is to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighbourhood. White people like to live in these neighbourhoods because they get credibility and respect from other white people for living in a more ‘authentic’ neighbourhood where they are exposed to ‘true culture’ every day. lander

This myth of authenticity is at the heart of Pulp’s song “Common People”. This paper aims to analyse how “Common People”, that is the song and the music video, depict and deconstruct any such myth – in Roland Barthes’ sense – of the working-class life as something cool and authentic. I want to show how “Common People” exposes the underlying mindset as poverty porn. It is tempting to read the song’s lyrics as an autobiographical account by the band’s lead singer Jarvis Cocker, as did a one-hour bbc 3 documentary on “The Story of ‘Common People’” (Grant and Stone). As the documentary suggests, Jarvis Cocker, who studied at St. Martins College, did meet a Greek student, who expressed the wish to “slum it”, as heard in the song. This paper will avoid giving in to the temptation of an overly biographical reading. However, one quote by Jarvis Cocker on his perception of the contemporary background that influenced the creation of “Common People” will be helpful to access the song’s narrative. According to Cocker, “it seemed to be in the air, that kind of patronising social voyeurism […] I felt that of Parklife, for example, or Natural Born Killers – there is that noble savage notion. But if you walk round a council estate, there’s plenty of savagery and not much nobility going on” (Sutcliff 114). It is exactly the kind of “patronising social voyeurism” (ibid.) “Common People” criticises, the voyeurism Cocker detected in the work of Blur, a Britpop band associated with “Cool Britannia”, or Oliver Stone’s controversial film Natural Born Killers from 1994. Apart from these two examples, social voyeurism as an aesthetic mode seemed to emerge as a side-effect, a pop-cultural movement towards a more naturalist and gritty aesthetic. Notable examples would be the novel and movie Trainspotting from 1996. The fashion industry’s foremost fad was heroin chic, as embodied by Kate Moss. The art world cherished Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tilmann’s gritty aesthetic. In line with this movement towards a social (faux-)realism, the 90s-mainstream embraced with Gangsta Rap a whole genre which is concerned with life in neglected neighbourhoods. The genre’s market success, however, was not only due to the people living in

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Compton, Inglewood or the Southside of Chicago. Record sales were ensured by the fascination Gangsta Rap held for other listeners whatever their class, ethnicity or nationality. For the white, well-off, middle-class listener, Gangsta Rap – authentic or not – represented a specific way of ‘slumming’ and consuming the social Other, a process that could be referred to as the “gentrification of Hip Hop”. In 2007 the New York Times asked: “Does Gentrification spoil the Birthplace of Hip Hop”. Yet, artist Macklemore already had answered this question in a song called “White Privilege”: “American Hip hop is gentrified” (Macklemore). Ultimately, the mentioned examples allow the expression as well as observation of a certain social group’s realities. The line between perceiving the respective cultural artefacts as documentaries or as poverty porn is thin. Yet this is exactly the line “Common People” manages to expose, namely the creation and deconstruction of class by different members of society. 2

The Commodification of Class and Space

“Common People” plays with the contradiction between various levels of signification, firstly the social realities of the working-classes and, secondly, their commodification in pop culture as seen in the mid- and late-90s, the resulting ambiguity of social signifiers and the resistance to perceived mis-readings of social realities. Song and video do so by aligning the concepts of class with specific spaces and the ensuing contradictions. The main contradiction is related to the question: Who are the “Common People” the song and its characters refer to in the first place? The song’s narrator sings of his meeting a young woman “from Greece” (Pulp, “Common People”), who “studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College” (ibid.). She is an upper-class girl, her “dad is loaded” (ibid.), and the fact that she studies sculpture does not seem to be based on considerations of employability either. Her main desire, then, is to “live like common people / […] to do whatever common people do / I want to sleep with common people […] like you.” (ibid.) Why? Because she “think[s] that poor is cool” (ibid). The combination of signifiers like Greece and sculpture offers a wealth of connotations: that of Greek culture, mythology, as well as tourism. Like a Greek Goddess she descends upon the lowly humans in Islington or Brixton. In the context of British popular culture the line “She came from Greece” conjures connotations of the Greek bourgeoisie of the 70s, an economic and political elite whose best-known representative was Aristotle Onassis as represented in the 1963 James Bond Movie From Russia with Love.

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At the very least she is a tourist visiting exciting foreign places. She is not, however, interested in traditional tourist attractions but seeks the authentic. She is turning the English lower classes into the exotic, delightful, sexualised Other. In the end, she “likes to sleep with common people” (Pulp, “Common People”). Between her social background and that of the “common people” she likes to mimic is a vast gap, a gap that she believes can be bridged easily. The narrator begs to differ. He knows that her desire is grounded not in reality, that is his reality, but in a specific myth thereof. This myth, I would like to define with Lewis Holloway and Phil Hubbard as an often vague and diffuse way of imagining particular ‘real places’ and the people in them. Such myths may be considered as a set of ‘stories’ about a place, stories whose origins and characteristics are difficult to pin down but become widely known, and often accepted, as having some basis in truth. Inevitably, these stories or myths serve to stereotype a particular place or sets of places by highlighting some of its characteristics in favour of others. holloway and Hubbard 117

A similar process of consuming other spaces and its inhabitants in form of a set of myths can be identified in “Common People” and the song’s male speaker tries to deconstruct her constructivist gaze. In order to challenge the set of characteristics underlying her myth and, “to make her understand”, the narrator guides her through such a “set of places”. These illustrate a descent from high culture to low culture, from past to present: The journey begins at Saint Martin’s College (“that’s were I, caught her eye”), which interestingly is not shown in the video. Saint Martin’s College represents the detachment of the ivory tower, higher learning, the fine arts, specifically that of antiquity. In the context of the song, the College is a sort of third space or contact zone, to transfer Mary Pratt’s terminology from the postcolonial context into one of classism. The college as contact zone allows different classes to meet. The second place in the song is a club. It still poses at a kind of levelled social playing field, however the relation between the two tips slightly over, since it is her that buys him drinks. But only at first sight gender roles are overturned, the person who pays for both their drinks is her father. “She told me that her Dad was loaded, I said ‘In that case I’ll have a rum and Coca-Cola’”. His choice of drink is significant on several levels. Firstly, rum and coke is a drink that, due to its low price, has strong connotations of being a working-class drink. So the protagonist’s choice, given the possibility to drink anything he wants, might

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be ­considered as a confirmation of his upbringings and social background. Secondly, “Rum and Coca-Cola” is a reference to a song of the same name by the Andrew Sisters from 1944. Whether this reference is conscious or not is hard to tell. It is, however, a very fitting one. The lyrics to the Andrew Sisters’ song also depict visitors (in this case g.i.s) visiting a foreign island (Trinidad) who are “Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola / Go down Point Koomahnah / Both mother and daughter / Workin’ for the Yankee dollar” (Sullavan and Baron). It is important to note that the Andrew Sisters’ version of the song was plagiarized, the song was previously published by two artists from Trinidad, Lionel Belasco and Rupert Grant. Not only was the Andrew Sisters’ rendition of “Rum and Coca-Cola” plagiarized, it turned the original’s critique of cultural and sexual exploitation into a superficial rendition. This transformation, whether intended or not, certainly plays into main the theme of “Common People”, that is the commodification of the social Other. In the following I will look more closely at the remaining two places, the supermarket and a repetitive row of rental housing. While the college and the club are the spaces where both initially meet and get to know each other, the supermarket serves a different function. This is the space he takes her with the intention to show her the realities of the working classes. But rather than merely showing these realities he wants her to imagine what it feels like to be poor; he wants her to imagine what the related lack of choice feels like. Ironically, he attempts to illustrate and document his realities by ultimately creating yet another imagined space for her: “Pretend you’ve got no money” (Pulp, “Common People”). The video beautifully illustrates his lack of agency. He is caged in a shopping cart which she is steering through a seemingly infinite aisle with boxes of garishly coloured “Pulp” on display left and right. Thus encaged in the cart, clutching the bars, he is excluded from the capitalistic processes, when she is the one who steers him through the infinite aisle like a mother her toddler. The speaker is unable to buy or even touch any of the goods and thus fully dependent on her, evoking connotations of the ‘nanny state’: He has to rely on others to sustain him, in this specific example she is the one who does so – with her father’s money. In addition, and maybe more importantly in the context of the song, his lack of agency turns him into an object to buy and consume. The exchange value at hand is his coolness and authenticity. And it is exactly these traits she desires. In her desire to appropriate the Other she illustrates Roland Barthes’s statement: “The bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and

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cannot live up to it except in imagination” (Barthes 132). The section of humanity on display for her and for the viewer are customers of various ages: a waiting and annoyed boy, a young female worker stacking the shelves with more pulp, an elderly man who steals one of the boxes, and an elderly woman slowly making her way along the endless rows of pulp. For these people, there is no real choice, everything is pulp, no matter its marketing, branding and prize. The wide choice of products is just a fake, an illusion and simulation. While the female character could buy anything, she purchases nothing. She has, as opposed to those around her, the choice not to buy pulp. The pulp she is, cynically, interested in, is of a different kind: She is slumming, and so is the viewer. The video almost forces us to classify the surroundings. Ultimately, her aspiration to live like common people turns out to be a specific realization of distinction in Bourdieu’s terms: her habitus, however, is not being defined by distancing herself from the social Other. Rather her financial background gives her the chance to experience lower-class life temporarily, since she “could call her daddy to stop it all.” Her possibility to choose makes her oblivious of everything that does not correspond with her myth and thus illustrates her selective perception. To speak with Barthes: “The function of myth is to empty reality” (Barthes 143). The supermarket, as shown in the video, poses as the perfect symbolic setting for appropriating the working-classes and maintaining a myth thereof, since, to speak with Roland Barthes, “myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for signification” (Barthes 127). In the video, the supermarket does just that: it avoids clear social distinctions. The social signifiers of class are highly ambiguous and denote hardly anything. Hence they are open to be refilled with a new, second-order signification. While the narrator and the Greek student visit the same material place, their respective perception, their mental spaces, differ completely. I want to illustrate this kind of mental mapping with two examples. Firstly, the boxes on the shelves: These boxes contain the same content over and over again, namely “pulp”. Their design strongly resembles Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, which makes sense in this context, since art and commodity dissolve. The everyday product is fetishized and elevated from the profane to an aesthetic level. Thus, the supermarket and the exhibited goods fail to signify the social relations at hand. Pierre Bourdieu might argue that “goods are converted into distinctive signs, which may be signs of distinction but also of vulgarity, as soon as they are perceived relationally” (Bourdieu 100).

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The second example is the old woman on the right hand side. She is, due to her age, slow walk, tired face, and pink dress, the opposite of the Greek student. More interestingly, she can be read as a super-signifier for several classes: On the one hand, the old woman represents a working-class/lower-middle class status, having to spend her money on “pulp”. On the other hand, she resembles an important elderly lady on the other end of the social spectrum, that is Queen Elizabeth ii. In a space where people and goods signify nothing and everything at the same time, myths prosper and provide multiple meanings. This relates to Barthes’s statement that “[t]he function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, an haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence” (Barthes 143). In this sense, the supermarket illustrates the conflation of everyday life and the sacred, of the mundane and the artistic, highbrow and lowbrow. The ambiguity of social signs represents a dissolving common identity and is thus reminiscent of “New Labour’s attempt to redress the class divide via consumption and grinning vacuity” (Hatherly). In “The End of the Social”, Jean Baudrillard argues similarly: “Media, all media, information, all information, act in two directions: outwardly they produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralise social relations and the social itself” (Baudrillard 90). This neutralisation of social signification is what allows her to appropriate the social Other in the first place. In the end, the trip to the supermarket confirms rather than deconstructs the Greek student’s myth of the lower classes. As the video illustrates she has a perfectly joyful experience. In response to being asked to “pretend you’ve got no money, she just laughed and said ‘Oh you’re so funny’”. However, “Common People” the video, as opposed to the song, is not a battle cry for class-consciousness, it is not agitprop. The video actually illustrates the makeshift nature of class-myths from above and from below. The fourth main space shows that the narrator’s understanding of the working classes is equally grounded in myth. At this point of the song/video he attempts to deconstruct her myth, by telling her what it feels like to belong to the “Common People”. He is aware that her illusion glosses over various experiences he has made and he tries to resist her production of meaning. He intends to undo a symbolic process Jean Baudrillard describes as follows: if the social is both destroyed by what produces it (the media, information) and reabsorbed by what consumes it (the masses), it follows that its

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definition is empty […] wherever it appears it conceals something else: defiance, death, seduction, ritual, repetition – it conceals that it is only abstraction and residue, or even simply an effect of the social, a simulation, and an illusion. baudrillard 91

The speaker tries to resist her empty definition of his life, by means of narration. Since the real space could not change her perspective, he provides an imagined, narrated space. To do so he points her towards what is concealed by her myth, namely “defiance, death, seduction, ritual, repetition” (ibid.). From the male character’s perspective, all these are elemental experiences related to his life. The seduction, the “screwing” (Pulp, “Common People”), the getting “laid” (ibid.) is part of a life filled with repetitions: “Smoke some fags and play some pool […] and dance and drink and screw / because there is nothing else to do” (ibid.). Everything remains the same day in, day out. The living conditions are dismal, “roaches climb the wall” (ibid.). Education offers no way out, he asks her to “pretend you never went to school” (ibid.). The repetition turns the daily life into an almost ritualistic experience, which is represented in the video: the dancers in the club are constantly repeating the same movement, so are the men fighting and brawling. The row of flats and its inhabitants are repeated over and over again while the male character strolls along. Difference conflates into sameness, individuality merges into one group; specific characters in the club, the supermarket and on the street appear various times or even simultaneously. The only way out of this life of repetition and numbing ritual is defiance: “Sing along with the common people, sing along and it just might get you through” (Pulp, “Common People”). 3

Deconstructing Myths

As Owen Hatherly argues in The Guardian, “this is no celebration of good, simple earthy proletarian life. Pulp and those they spoke for were not ‘common’ by choice” (Hatherly). For the song’s female character, however, it is a choice, because she just could call her dad “to stop it all”. Finally, he realizes that there is no way to make her understand, that she will “never live like common people”. While she is actually able to enjoy her myth (“she just smiled and held my hand”) and is thus fully able to grasp ‘her’ reality, he cannot do so. His attempt at countering her myth of the lower classes fails due to the following irony: While he, as opposed to her, has first-hand experiences with the

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life he talks about, his representation is, nonetheless, equally stereotypical. His depiction of lower class life has been recounted in endless novels, songs, poems. Think for example of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool”, which lists almost the same characteristics as does “Common People”: We real cool We Left school. We Lurk Late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. This is not to say that his experiences are not genuine. Still, the song’s voice is feeding rather than resisting her myth. If she, as indicated in the song, believes that “poor is cool”, and he confirms and illustrates these very realities of poverty, he strengthens rather than weakens the cynical equation at hand. The female character accepts her myth of the coolness of the underclasses as a “factual system whereas it is but a semiological system” (Barthes 113). Yet his delivery of the real facts feeds right into her second-order myth, rather than highlighting the first-order representations it is built on. As Hatherly argues: “Class-consciousness is often sharpest at its margins, where it meets other classes, where it’s aware of other options – where it is in some proximity to the enemy.” But what if the margins dissolve with the concepts and realities they delineate? This leads me back to the initial question: Who are the common people? Just listening to the lyrics we are presented with a rather gritty, pessimistic and sad reality. The common people are clearly depicted as the underclasses, the precariat. But connected with the video’s visuals, the rows of rental houses rather than council estates, we see something else: a rather homely, if repetitive depiction of, at least, lower-middle class life. It is in front of these common people that the speaker recounts his dreadful experiences. And I would argue that this choice for the video is not just a question of aesthetics. It would have been easy to match the lyrics’ depictions with adequate images. Powerful examples would be Romain Gavrais’ video for the song “Stress” by Justice or, to stay in the English context, w.i.z.’s video to

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“Sirens” by Dizzee Rascal. The video to “Common People” chooses a different approach, one, I would like to argue, that resists mythology by means of campy aesthetics. On the textual level, the male speaker does not succeed with his attempts to deconstruct the myth. The reason for this, according to Barthes, can be found in the fact that “myth can reach everything, corrupt everything, and even the very act of refusing oneself to it” (Barthes 121). But the video succeeds in the demystification. As myth “aims at an ultra-signification” (ibid), in consequence “the best weapon against myth is […] to produce an artificial myth” (Barthes 123). So, can a style like camp serve the same function as an antidote to the myth? The very fact that camp as an art form or style is so hard to define is a first indication that it can do so. This difficulty to define camp makes it almost incorruptible by an outside myth. The very essence of camp is being an empty form, and the concentration on form rather than content. This is the very idea and motivation and not a semiological failure: “Camp is a private code. […] To talk about camp is therefore to betray it” (Sontag 108). This “large element of artifice” (ibid.) likens camp to myth. Camp uses everything in quotation marks, “It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp’, it’s not a woman but a ‘woman’” (Sontag 109). By doing so, camp is constantly questioning and changing significations. It is the perfect mode for the mythologist to perceive the world: He sees the distinctions between form and content, perception and reality, which, however, never allows him to “grasp [and enjoy] things in their fullness” (Barthes 139). Camp, being an almost indefinable form by choice, can hardly be corrupted by another myth, as there is almost no way of signifying it. Camp is rather a form of creating myths than a myth itself, a system whose signifiers are mainly based on taste, and thus are less semiotic. This might explain the campy aesthetics of the video, which seemingly contradicts the lyrics of “Common People”. What the character on the narrative level cannot do, the video itself is able to achieve: the deconstruction of the myth. Finally, it is important to note that the video omits essential parts of the song’s lyrics as heard on the album. On the album version the Greek student is warned explicitly of these “Common People”: Like a dog lyin’ in a corner They will bite and never warn you, Look out They’ll tear your insides out ‘Cause everybody hates a tourist’ Especially one who thinks It’s all such a laugh.

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Where the song itself is more concerned with maintaining class-definitions from below, the video deals with the dissolution of class and class-signifiers and the resulting myths from the top and from the bottom. In doing so the video is prophetic rather than descriptive. As opposed to a Britpopband like Oasis, who constantly stressed their working-class past, Pulp had a better sense of the paradoxical future to come: neo-liberalism and New Labour, Cool Britannia and De-Industrialization. If we want to believe the recently published Great British Class Survey and accept its redefinition of the class system, Pulp were right. And they were not too supportive of some of these changes. At the end, the video resists the gentrification of culture rather than of space, the gentrification of identity rather than Islington, Brixton, and other places of gentrification. When being asked to support New Labour’s election campaign, Pulp declined and responded with a song called “Cocaine Socialism”. I want to close this with a short excerpt of said song: I’d just like to tell you that I love all of your albums / Could you sign this for my daughter / She’s in hospital / Her name is Miriam / Now I’ll get down to the gist / Do you want a line of this / Are you a socialist Well you sing about common people / So can you bring them to my party and get them all to sniff this and all I’m really saying is ‘Come on and rock the vote for me’ / All I’m really saying is come on / Roll up that note for me / Your choice in all of this is: do you want hits or do you want misses? / Are you a socialist? And we’ve waited such a long time for the chance to help our own kind / So now please come on and toe the party line. pulp, “Cocaine Socialism”

“Common People”, in particular, and Pulp in general resisted the idea of a ‘Cool Britannia’ before it was cool. Works Cited Primary References

Cocker, Jarvis. “Common People.” By A Pulp Different Class. 1995. cd. Macklemore. “White Privilege”. By Macklemore. The Language of my World. 2005. cd. Pulp. “Common People.” Online video clip. Vimeo. Vimeo. 19 May 2013. Web. Pulp. “Cocaine Socialism.” A Little Soul. Islands, 1998. cd. Pulp. “Common People.” A Different Class. Islands, 1995a. cd. Pulp. “Mis-Shapes.” A Different Class. Islands, 1995b. cd.

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Research Literature

Barthes, Roland. Myth Today: A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang. 1995. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “The End of the Social”. Class. Ed. Patrick Joyce. Oxford up, 1995. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Source Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Print. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. Print. Gonzalez, David. “Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of HipHop?” New York Times. The New York Times. 21 May 2007. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. Grant, Paul and Colin Stone. “The Story of Pulp’s ‘Common People’”. bbc Three. bbc. 14 Feb. 2006. Television. Hatherly, Owen. “Pulp Matter More Than Ever in Today’s Cowed Popcultural Landscape.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 14 June 2011. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. Holloway, Lewis, and Phil Hubbard. People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2001. Lander, Christian. “Gentrification”. Stuff White People Like. 22 Feb. 2008. Web. 2. May 2013. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Sontag, Susan. “On Camp”. A Susan Sontag Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Hardwick. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print. Sullavan, Jeri, and Paul Baron. “Coca Cola & Rum.” By Andrew Sisters. 1945. Vinyl. Sutcliffe, Phil. “Common as Muck!”. Q-Magazine (March 1996): 114. Print.

Chapter 6

Chavs: The Clash of Social Classes in Urban Britain Frank Erik Pointner Abstract This essay is concerned with the construction of the “chav” in contemporary Britain, starting with an outline of the general preconception that the members of the new urban underclass share properties such as being aggressive, sexually promiscuous and drug abusive in addition to being constantly on the dole. It will suggest that the chav with all of these features is a creation of the middle classes who construct their own identity against the chav Other. It will move on to an analysis of two recent novels which treat the chav-phenomenon, namely Grace Dent’s Trainers V. Tiaras (2007) and J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (2013).

Keywords Chavs – media construction – stereotypes – Pierre Bourdieu – Little Britain – Grace Dent – J.K. Rowling



Chavs: A Middle Class Construction

In 2004, in an article disparaging the reality television programme wife swap, Toby Young uses the epithet that has been applied to certain members of the working class ever since the beginning of the new millennium: “chav”. Like so many of the “wives” featured on this programme – in fact, Becky and Jason aren’t married – she’s an uneducated, white, working class woman and the programme’s makers left no stone unturned in their efforts to depict her as “council trash”. She was never without a fag in one hand and a can of lager in the other, even when she was feeding one of her three feral children. As so often before, the programme was designed to appeal to the snob in all of us. Here, for all the world to see, was a prime example of that new urban species known as “the chav”. young 2004

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This quotation is remarkable for several reasons. For one, it puts chav on a level with “council trash”, a term still more transparent in 2004 than the corresponding neologism. Chavs, it suggests, originate in urban environments, live in council houses, do not work and are on the dole. What is more, they neglect their children, who inevitably turn out to be “feral”. This is due to the fact that – let us fill in the gap here – they were born by teenage mothers who are not even sure who the father of their brat is. But how could they, having in all likelihood conceived when they were entirely inebriated?1 Thus in 2004, we already had most of the properties of the chav that have been reiterated up to the present day on television, on the internet, in newspapers and magazines. But Toby Young’s article is interesting for yet another “fact”: the construction of the chav in a television programme is meant to appeal to us, the snobs, when being exposed to such creatures. Or, in other words, it enhances the sense of superiority of the bourgeoisie or, in more common terms, the middle class. Chavs, like all social groupings, are a construction. “Groups, such as social classes are to be made. They are not given in ‘social reality’” (Bourdieu 1989: 18). It is the contention of this essay that the chav is a creation of the middle classes for the middle classes, who needed an ‘Other’ to elevate themselves. Newspapers, magazines, internet blogs, and also, as we will see, fictional texts are responsible for disseminating stereotypes of the urban lower classes. These stereotypes are adopted by their middle-class readers and in this respect the chav-stereotype is no different from any other social prejudice: One of the most striking observations that can be made about ­stereotypes, is that individuals can easily come to develop or endorse stereotypes of groups whose members they have never in fact encountered face-to-face. With the advent of mass communication technology, stereotypes can now be quickly and widely diffused to vast numbers of people. […] Via the mass media, and especially television, individuals experience representations of members of social categories and groups that they rarely, or sometimes never, meet in their everyday encounters. cinnirella 1997: 39f

1 Everything derogatory written about the urban working class in this essay does not represent my own opinion. When I started reconstructing the discourse on the “chav” in the media today, I realized that it was systematically impossible to use inverted commas and disclaimers. The essay would have become simply unreadable. However, I request the reader to imagine the appropriate quotation marks, most of all as regards the term “chav” itself.

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By stating that one may endorse stereotypes even without having come into contact with a member of the group in question, Cinnirella brings in a topographical observation which will figure in this essay. How are the social classes situated in urban space? What happens when the congruency between topographical and social borders disintegrates? Here J.K. Rowling’s The Casual V ­ acancy, which the final part of this essay will deal with, proves to be enlightening. But let us start with the construction of the chav in general. A very important step towards the creation of a new urban class was nomenclature. Only when the epithet was invented and started to disseminate into everyday discourse did chavs come into existence. The traditional term working class just did not lend itself to general derogation being associated with honest lads who were the driving force of the industrial revolution which made Britain great, working men who had little to do with the scum that roams the streets of urban Britain today. The attitude expressed by Simon Heffner in 2007 in The Telegraph is exemplary: Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as “middle-class”, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicted squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass. heffer

Since Thatcher started the transformation of Britain into a service economy back in the 80s, it is often claimed, the respectable members of the former working class succeeded in climbing the social ladder. Only the lowlifes who were too lazy to work for their daily bread remained at the bottom of society, forming a new “underclass”. Their lifestyle has nothing to do with that of the respectable working class of the days of yore. As Owen Jones puts it, summing up the general attitude of the middle classes towards chavs: “Above all, the term ‘chav’ now encompasses any negative traits associated with working-class people – violence, laziness, teenage pregnancies, racism, drunkenness, and the rest” (Jones 8). Thus Jones suggests that the term constructed the category. This linguistic entity was needed since the old denomination “working class” would not have allowed for the degree of disparagement we witness towards underprivileged white urban people today. In an article adequately called “Yeah but,

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no but, why I’m proud to be a chav”, Julie Burchill even suggests that the slanders this class endures is the only form of racism still acceptable. [T]he white indigenous English working-class is now the one group you can insult without feeling the breath of the Commission for Racial Equality on your neck, which makes it pretty damn cowardly apart from being what I call “social racism”. burchill, “Yeah but”

There is some truth in the assertion that there are public bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission who take care that nobody is discriminated against because of his race, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief. But what about those who are bashed because of their social background? Just imagine someone derogating West Indian immigrants along the following lines: [Chavs] tend to live in England but would probably pronounce it “Engerland.” They have trouble articulating themselves and have little ability to spell or write. They love their pit bull dogs as well as their blades. And would happily “shank” you if you accidentally brush past them or look at them in the wrong way. They tend to breed by the age of fifteen and spend most of their days trying to score “super-skunk” or whatever “gear” they can get their sweaty teenage hands on. If they are not institutionalized by twenty-one they are considered pillars of strength in the community or get “much respect” for being lucky. jones 4

This is Richard Hilton, the chief executive of a London fitness centre catering for well-to-do members of the middle class. Of course this statement on inarticulate, dyslexic, aggressive, scruffy chavs has a clear agenda. Hilton wants to arouse fear in his “respectable” customers, who have to take arms against the chav onslaught that will inevitably come their way on the streets of ­London. ‘Be on guard’, he suggests, ‘and the best way to do so is to take one of the selfdefence courses in “chav fighting” my centre offers.’ And we may be sure that his utterance falls on fertile soil with his middle-class customers having become alert to the chav problem through the mass media. As so often is the case, “the sneering reveals more about the detractor than the chavs” (Burchill, “Yeah but”). It is of course a truism that by stereotyping others one also stereotypes oneself. Or, to put it more scientifically, every heterostereotyping is at the same

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time an autostereotyping. If I derogate an outgroup as being uneducated, lazy and aggressive, I simultaneously elevate my own ingroup as being well-refined, hard-working and the paragon of gentility (cf. Cinnirella 47ff.). Thus, the general chav-bashing may stem to a large extent from the middle class’s need to feel good about themselves. Burchill sees this as the primary motivation of “chavbaiters”: “[T]here really was nowt so queer as folk who were keen to feel better about themselves by looking down on others” (Burchill, “It’s time”). Burchill may, however, be going a bit far when she announces: “I have noticed many times over the past decade that chav-baiters are often joyless, sex-starved skinflints who envy chavs more than they despise them” (ibid.). However, one should not forget that when Burchill talks about chavs she does not have the track-suited council house tenant in mind. She is referring to “chav-icons” such as Katie Price and David Beckham, whose “chavbackground” has not stopped them from being successful and making a lot of money. In fact, whole internet sites are devoted to lists of “filthy rich chavs”. Mail Online has a leading article called “The Chav Rich List”, which ranks chav celebrities according to their income. Not surprisingly, the list is headed by David and Victoria Beckham. This supports Burchill’s suggestion that the general disparagement of the lower classes by the middle class is due to mere envy, because their chav identity has not prevented them from becoming financially successful: Thus individuals who aren’t getting any good lovin’ will hiss on ceaselessly about how slaggy chavs are; those who know that secretly their job is one long duck, dive’n’skive (journalists are particularly culpable here) will bang on about how idle chavs are; and those who stayed in long and expensive educations yet are earning less before tax per annum than Wayne Rooney spends on valet parking each year will be rather cross about how much money he pulls in with no help from anyone but his rather clever feet. burchill “Yeah but”

While it may be to some extent true that particularly middle class journalists, who have been responsible for chav-bashing in the first place, want to get back at national icons such as David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Katie Price and ­Steven Gerrard, this does not explain the success that the construction of chavs enjoys in popular media. Owen Jones (112ff.) discusses a whole variety of websites devoted to chav-disparagement. Here is one quotation randomly chosen, pretending to be the account of a conversation between two supermarket employees in Winchester:

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Even when they are on the checkout, the customer is always invisible as they chat about pregnancies at fourteen, and how “Cristal got drunk on Friday night, and went home with Tyrone – the bastard” etc. etc. ad nauseam. jones 112

The question is why statements such as these are supposed to be funny. The explanation that comes to mind is that they trigger that sneer of superiority. Freely adapted from Swift, we look into the mirror and see everybody’s face but our own, and thus behold the other which either inspires a sense of awe, if felt to be threatening, or a sense of detached amusement, if kept at arm’s length. In order to create the second effect – irrespective of whether the statement occurs as a blog on the net or in a television sitcom watched by millions of people – preconceived opinions about a certain social grouping have to be corroborated. Only then will the ego of the viewer get the necessary boost. In our particular statement everything we always knew is affirmed: Chavs, if not on the dole, are either cleaners or, as in our particular case, supermarket employees. They prefer to gossip and swear in working class accents instead of doing their jobs; they get pregnant at the age of 14 or 15 in order to receive social benefits; they have typical chav names like Cristal or Tyrone; they abuse drugs and sleep around. Looking at this list we may also surmise that the smile it triggers also has an element of relief in it: “Thank God, I am not like that!” Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard presents an adequate example from the popular medium of the sitcom. Her obesity, her pink tracksuit, and her “council house facelift” totally correspond to the phenotype of the “chavette”. Coupling that with her promiscuity, anti-social behaviour, drug consumption, and filthy language, we have the perfect representative of the white urban underclass as constructed by the media. Of course, we as viewers are aware of the exaggeration of the stereotype, but our suspension of disbelief is willingly granted. So we laugh at the other, who is everything we are not.

Grace Dent: Trainers V. Tiaras (2007)

A comparatively lighthearted construction of the “chavette” in her natural habitat is Grace Dent’s book series Diary of a Chav, which contains six volumes. The books consist of diary entries of the Essex girl Shiraz Bailey Wood and bears revealing titles such as Slinging the Bling, Too Cool for School and The Ibiza Diaries. The first part has a pink cover displaying the alliterative title Trainers v.

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Tiaras and has the words “chav” inscribed in rhinestone. What makes the book (and the whole series) enjoyable is that its protagonist and her environment display the harmless characteristics usually associated with chavs while leaving out the frightening ones. Shiraz family is not dysfunctional – her parents love each other and care for their children – she is not anti-social, does not take drugs and has not had a boyfriend yet, although she is “already” fifteen. How much she cares for her family becomes evident when her big sister after a row with her mother elopes with her wayward boyfriend to London. Shiraz is so concerned about her well-being that she leaves no stone unturned in seeking her out. Eventually, she persuades her sister to come home and make peace with her mother. Shiraz’s chav identity manifests itself most in her outward appearance. She has a weakness for pink track suits, matching trainers, massive bling, likes to eat at McDonald’s, loiters with her girlfriends in shopping malls, play grounds and the park. What is more, she and her friends all bear names that come with a social stigma, such as Uma, Cava-Sue (actually her sister), Chantalle, Colette, Latoya and Kezia. Here is an entry randomly chosen from December 25, representing stereotypical chav taste in clothes. I hope my big sister, Cava-Sue Wood, gets over her whiny-ass self and stops whingeing in the top bunk bed about getting a lemon dressing gown and a pink velour tracksuit off ‘Santa’ this morning. Does she think I’m happy with my Niko trainers off Walthamstow market? Nobody wears Niko trainers at Mayflower. NOT EVEN THE ASYLUM SEEKERS: I’ll have to fake another mugging. dent 5

Or December 27: Carrie came round today with her iPod. I hid my Niko trainers under my bunk, but I showed her my pink hoodie and my new gold hoop earrings. Carrie went a bit red then and admitted that she got gold hoops and a hoodie too as a ‘stocking filler’. dent 7

Besides clothes and bling, pastime activities play a very important role in configuring the stereotypical chav. Here is the beginning of the entry for December 28: “So I get up at eleven and Mum, Dad and Cava-Sue are all in the living room in their dressing gowns watching The World’s Wackiest Lawnmower Stunts on Sky One, eating Quality Street” (Dent 8). The novel does not even stop short

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of depicting the shopping mall as one of the gathering places of chav youngsters. January 12: No school today, thank God. Me and Carrie went to Ilford Mall ‘cos Carrie needed to take back the too-small Calvin Klein bra. All the usual Year Ten faces were down the mall. Chantalle, Luther, Kezia, and like twenty other randoms were all on the third floor hanging about the food court stressing out the security guards by wearing their hoodies up and laughing too loudly and asking the staff at Magic Spuds for beakers of free tap water. dent 30

This is the closest the novel comes to tackling the stereotypical anti-social behaviour associated with chavs. However, laughing loudly and asking for free tap water certainly does not constitute a criminal offence, and, conclusively, the interpretation that the Diary of a Chav is not meant to boost the anxiety of middle class readers still holds true. Most interestingly, Shiraz’s family is directly configured against the middle class Other. Shiraz’s sister Cava-Sue, who desperately tries to leave her chav identity behind, is starring in a college production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Of course, it is a recipe for disaster when Shiraz takes her mother and grandmother to see the play. The first sentence of the entry for Wednesday, July 16, already shows her mother’s priorities. “Tonight me, Mum and Nan went to Cava Sue’s college to see Waiting for Godot. We nearly missed the start ‘cos Mum was trying to set Sky+ for Dog Borstal and find her spare packet of Kensitas Club” (Dent 145). One of the most significant plays of the 20th century is named in the same breath as a television programme about the most dangerous dogs in the country which are tamed by the most manly dog trainers. In addition, her mother’s preferences are symbolized by the packet of cheap cigarettes, whose retrieval is more important than the play in which her daughter plays the main part. When Mrs. Wood’s mobile phone rings in the middle of the production an argument ensues, which directly exemplifies the conflict smouldering between her social class and the middle class Other. Everyone in the theatre hears her conversation: ‘All right darling? I can’t talk. I’m in the theatre. IN THE THEATRE! Our Cava-Sue’s in a play. Yeah. YEAH! I know! Nah, not really. Nah, it’s not up to much. I ain’t got a clue what’s happening. It’s in Cantonese I reckon!’ […] ‘Excuse me!’ shouted the woman with the glasses. ‘There is a no-mobilephone-rule during performances!’

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‘Oh Glo, I’ll ring ya back. Some woman ‘here is taking the right hump,’ sighed my mum. ‘I am not some woman!’ tutted the woman. ‘I am Cava Sue’s drama teacher! I produced this performance.’ dent 147

What is interesting here is not so much that her mother does not have any access to the play. Much more telling is her opponent’s reaction. She cannot help but reveal her middle class identity at once. She is not “some woman” or, as we may be tempted to add ‘some chav woman’. After all, she belongs to the social class which knows that Beckett’s play is not in Cantonese. It is her class which decides what people consume when they are respectable, and in this regard Beckett is as good as Shakespeare. And, we may be sure it is her class who derogates Dog Borstal. Once again Bourdieu brings it down to the essentials: Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. bourdieu, Distinction 6

Applied to our discussion, chavs or working class people in general are made by the middle classes who set the standard of cultural consumption. They decide what is respectable, and thus implicitly, or here even explicitly, denigrate those who cannot or do not want to keep track. As Bourdieu sums it up: “That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences” (7).

J.K. Rowling: The Casual Vacancy (2012)

J.K. Rowling’s novel The Casual Vacancy also treats the construction of social differences between the middle class and chavs (although the epithet is never used). Here the focus lies more on the connection between social class and topographical space. The novel dwells on the bourgeois inhabitants of the small town of Pagford, “cupped in a hollow between three hills, one of which was crested with the remains of the twelfth-century abbey. A thin river snaked around the edge of the hill and through town, straddled by a toy stone bridge.” (Rowling 19) This apparent paradise is threatened by the neighbouring city

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of Yarvil which, throughout the years, has come closer and closer to Pagford. What is more, its council house estates known collectively as “The Fields” legally belong to Pagford, so that their lowlife inhabitants are entitled to use the small town’s public facilities, such as schools or, most importantly, an addiction clinic. That all this will produce class conflicts is self-evident. Here is the situation report: Graffiti blossomed on the bridges spanning the Pagford to Yarvil road; Fields bus shelters were vandalized: Fields teenagers strewed the play park with beer bottles and threw rocks at the street lamps. A local footpath, much favoured by tourists and ramblers, became a popular spot for Fields youths to congregate. rowling 57

Low life youths from Yarvil invade pastoral Pagford, defacing the town, abusing alcohol and showing all kinds of anti-social behaviour. All in all, these youngsters corroborate all prejudices of the middle-class anti-chav discourse. Worst of all, children from respectable families are forced to mingle with that scum: No part of Pagford’s unwanted burden caused more fury or bitterness than the fact that Fields children now fell inside the catchment area of St Thomas’s Church of England Primary School. Young Fielders had the right to don the coveted blue and white uniform, to play in the yard beside the foundation stone laid by Lady Charlotte Sweetlove and to deafen the tiny classrooms with their strident Yarvil accents. […] Their beautiful St Thomas’s […] would be overrun and swamped by the offspring of scroungers, addicts and mothers whose children had all been fathered by different men. rowling 57

Interestingly, the underclass identity of the Yarvil children in St Thomas church is constructed through their guardians, who are criminals, drug abusers and promiscuous women, in other words: chavs of the worst kind. Nothing good can come of that. In Pagford time is out of joint. Normally one should expect people of the lower social order to keep to themselves and not seek out the places where their betters live. Here is the depiction of social normality according to Bourdieu: It is true that one can observe almost everywhere a tendency toward spatial segregation, people who are close together in social space tending to

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find themselves, by choice or by necessity, close to one another in geographic space; nevertheless, people who are very distant from each other in social space can encounter one another and interact, if only briefly and intermittently in physical space. bourdieu, “Social Space” 16

The last half sentence of Bourdieu’s assertion is of central importance here. People of different social spheres who live in different environments have always encountered each other, however “only briefly and intermittently”. Pagfordians have always gone to the pictures in Yarvil or may have worked there, in the course of which they certainly have met “chavs”. But at night they sat in the cosy living rooms of their semi-detached houses in Pagford and at weekends they played cricket on the village green, nicely sequestered from urban lowlifes. But this normal congruency between social space and physical space, i.e. the fact that middle-class people live in rural Pagford and chavs live in urban Yarvil, is dissolving. Middle-class Pagfordians are forced to encounter and interact with chavs from Yarvil in their front gardens, which is felt by the middle-class proponents to be against the naturally given order of things. The old geographical barriers have lost their meaning: “The natural barriers of river and hill that had once been guarantors of Pagford’s sovereignty seemed diminished by the speed with which the red-brick houses multiplied” (Rowling 55). Once, the physical space of the middle class and that of the chavs was clearly defined. Now the spaces overlap and Pagfordians are forced to integrate people from Yarvil into their space. This has strong repercussions on the social sphere. Once again Bourdieu: [S]ocial space is so constructed that agents who occupy similar or neighboring positions are placed in similar conditions and subjected to similar conditionings, and therefore have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing practices that are themselves similar. bourdieu, “Social Space” 17

Social practices and social space usually correspond. However, conflict ensues when the dissolution of clearly defined social spaces results in people from a social space associated with “lower” social practices participate in those of their “betters”. In the novel, this conflict is almost personified by Krystal Weedon, whose first name alone does not leave any doubt about her social class, as does her outward appearance:

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The pavement swarmed with children and teenagers walking towards school, many of them in T-shirts, despite the cold. Andrew spotted Krystal Weedon, byword and dirty joke. She was bouncing along, laughing uproariously, in the middle of a mixed group of teenagers. Multiple earrings swung from each ear, and the string of her thong was clearly visible above her low-slung tracksuit bottoms. rowling 26

Krystal who lives with her drug addict mother in the Fields had been living with her grandmother in Pagford when she was put to school and thus fell into the district of St Thomas’s, where her “slow passage up the school resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties” (58). As if this were not enough, as if it did not suffice that respectable Pagford children were forced to mingle with Krystal Weedon – actually the reason why some of those children changed school – town councillor Barry Fairbrother takes her into the St Thomas’s rowing team. There is hardly any sporting activity more associated with the higher strata of society than rowing. Rowing is what the middle and upper classes do. It is the foremost sport of Oxford and Cambridge. It is the form of “cultural consumption” that more than any other “fulfill[s the] social function of legitimating social differences” (Bourdieu, Distinction 7). If someone from Krystal’s social background takes part in such an activity, and, more seriously, even becomes part of the school’s official rowing crew, social hierarchies are turned topsy-turvy. Interestingly, both parties feel uncertain with regard to this ‘anomaly’. Not only do middle class Pagfordians feel uncomfortable about Krystal’s involvement in the rowing team, her peers have something to say about it, too. After all “Krystal had taken a lot of abuse from Nikki and the others for joining” (Rowling 106). Most of all, Krystal feels uncomfortable herself, having expected her fellow team mates to look down on her. She remembers how Barry Fairbrother, the middle-class coach of the team, used to drive them to their training site. His twin daughters Niamh and Siobhan, and Sukhvinder Jawanda came in the car too. Krystal had no regular contact with these three girls during school hours, but since becoming a team, they had always said ‘all right’? when they passed each other in the corridors. Krystal had expected them to look down their noses at her jokes. They had adopted some of her favourite phrases. She was, in some sense, the crew’s leader. rowling 105

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If it is true that cultural practices define social class, and if we further observe that identities are never fixed but always in the process of becoming,2 it should also be true that one may partly change the performance of one’s identity if one takes on the social practice normally associated with a class different from one’s own. Being part of the rowing crew, Krystal for the first time consorts with her betters Niamh and Siobhan (Barry Fairbrother’s daughters) and Sukhvinder (daughter of the local gp). However, her being friends with these girls from a superior social background is only good as long as the social practice which forged them together is still on the agenda. But alas, this is not to be, as the liaison teacher realizes: “The rowing eight would be finished. Nobody except Barry could have brought Krystal Weedon into any group and kept her there. She would leave, Tessa knew it; probably Kristal knew it herself” (Rowling 44). With the death of Barry Fairbrother and the concomitant demise of the rowing team, Krystal will fall back on the habitus associated with her social class, or, to use the popular nomenclature, with her chav identity. And the results are catastrophic. Her decision that only a pregnancy could get her out of her domestic squalor – here we have the teenage pregnancy which proves a major building block of the young chav girl’s stereotype – will make her seek out a class mate to copulate with. While the two youngsters are at it, Krystal neglects her infant brother who drowns in the local river, as a result of which she commits suicide.

The Reader

Both novels, Grace Dent’s Trainers V. Tiaras and J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy construct the clash of the English middle class with the urban underclass whose members are commonly referred to as chavs. Both texts emphasize the fact that the two classes distinguish themselves from each other by their habitus, speech, dress, as well as the social and topographical space they inhabit. However, bearing this in mind, we should also consider who the two novels are written for. The target reader is certainly middle class. Thus, Grace Dent feeds a light-hearted Horatian satire to readers for whom it will spark a sense of recognition, constantly reminding them of the lower class boys and girls they 2 As Stuart Hall has it: “[I]dentities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation” (Hall 4).

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have seen loitering in fast food restaurants, parks and shopping malls. In this respect, it may ossify condescending and paternalistic attitudes by explicitly attaching the label chav to these youngsters. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy is a different matter. For once it depicts the under-privileged lower class girl without assigning the label chav to her, although it will in all likelihood be in the middle-class reader’s mind. However, patronizing postures will be the least likely reader response to Kristal Weedon and the likes of her. What we have to grant to J.K. Rowling is that she counters the general middle-class attitude which states that chavs occupy the social space they deserve, since their anti-social behaviour, their being on the dole, their drug abuse etc. is their free choice. By contrast, Kristal’s plight is the result of the social environment she was born into. From this angle, the hostility she encounters is entirely undeserved. Even her intention to get pregnant, which will in the end lead to the catastrophe, is indirectly induced by the enmity she is constantly confronted with. Had her betters had a more caring attitude towards her or had they at least granted her the opportunities that middle class children have she might have found other ways out of her misery. This is the unease readers of The Casual Vacancy certainly feel when closing the book for good, hopefully making themselves aware of their complicity in the configuration of the very social class commonly referred to as “chavs”. Works Cited Primary References

Dent, Grace. Diary of a Chav: Trainers V. Tiaras. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007. Rowling, Joanne K. The Casual Vacancy. London: Little, Brown, 2012.

Research Literature

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, ma: Harvard up, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 14–25. Burchill, Julie. “Yeah but, no but, Why I’m Proud to Be a Chav”. The Times. The Times, Web. 18 Feb. 2005. Burchill, Julie. “It’s Time to Tackle the Chav-Baiters”. The Independent. The Independent, 29 July 2011. Web. Cinnirella, Marco. “Ethnic and National Stereotypes: A Social Perspective”. Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. C.C. Barfoot. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 37–51.

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Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Paul du Gay and Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1996. 1–17. Heffner, Simon. “We Pay to Have an Underclass.” The Telegraph. The Telegraph, Web. 29 Aug. 2007. Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso, 2011. Pearlman, Natasha. “The Chav Rich List.” Mail Online. Web. 6 Oct. 2006. Young, Toby. “Couples on Wife Swap Are Divorced from Reality”. No Sacred Cows. 7 Nov. 2004.

Chapter 7

The Other Dublin: Homelessness, Abject Comedy and Challenges to the Urban Order in Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul (2004) Mark Schmitt Abstract Homelessness poses a challenge to urban order that, if it is represented cinematically, can likewise influence the modes of filmic representations of the city. In this essay, I argue that film is a spatial and corporeal form of representation that partakes in the construction and organisation of urban space. In that respect, the focus on characters that are usually excluded from dominant representations of the cityscape offers a subversive renegotiation of common representations of the city. In my analysis of Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul, I will demonstrate how the film challenges common cinematic constructions of Dublin as a progressive city during the economically successful Celtic Tiger years by focussing on two homeless protagonists and their abject bodily presence in the cityscape.

Keywords Lenny Abrahamson – Stephen Shaviro – Judith Butler – Ireland – Dublin – Celtic tiger and recession – Irish Cinema – Homelessness – cinematic space – cinematic body – Abjection – precarious life – poetics of inversion – marginalisation

1 Introduction Homelessness is often perceived as a challenge or even a threat to urban order – especially so when it converges with other forms of deviance like insanitariness, begging, drug addiction or misconduct and criminal behaviour.1 Urban space and particularly the proverbial streets can be seen as an area of public 1 The conference paper this article is based on was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg, Germany (33-7532.20/725).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_010

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life and active participation that may range from simple de Certeauian “practices of everyday life” to blatant acts of resistance and subversion. In that respect, homelessness can be regarded as a challenge to concepts of urban space precisely because of its inherent passivity. The homeless are not actively and intentionally partaking in the creation of the streets as a site of public civic life. They are a scandalous challenge to urban life because they incorporate a fundamental paradox: they seem to obtrude on the public by claiming privacy in a non-private space and thus represent an inversion of urban order, as I have argued elsewhere (cf. Hickey and Schmitt 37). It is this obtrusion on the public, and hence the implied threat of the inversion of its urban order, that is at the centre of Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul from 2004, a film that radically breaks with the conventions of contemporary representations of Dublin as the capital of Ireland’s new-found identity as an affluent, globalised and metropolitan culture. Adam & Paul epitomises a new and unique kind of Irish urban films emerging throughout the mid-2000s that focus on marginal subjects and on the bleaker sides of post-Celtic Tiger Dublin. In the following, I will situate Abrahamson’s film within the field of Irish cinema and read it as a text that, following a poetics of inversion, engages with Dublin’s cityscape by portraying its homeless protagonists’ abject bodies as inscribed with the city’s order, thereby offering a renegotiation of filmic representations of Ireland’s capital and their underlying ideologies. 2

Cinema and Urban Space

Homeless people rarely feature prominently in contemporary film. Where they do, however, their depiction offers the opportunity to challenge mainstream images of the city and the values they convey. Film scholar Steven Shaviro argues for an analysis of the ways film as a “vivid medium” lets power work “in the depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the disembodied realm of ‘representation’” (Shaviro viii). Mark Shiel and David B. Clarke conceptualise the cinematic city by building on Shaviro’s work. With Shiel, I contend that cinema is a “peculiarly spatial form of culture” (Shiel 5) that is best approached from an interdisciplinary standpoint. We should understand cinema not as a mere textual “reflection of urban and social change ‘on the ground’” (4) or as working “according to a logic of representation” (Clarke 7), but by regarding cinema as “a set of practices and activities, as well as a set of texts” that “never ceases to intervene in society, and participates in the maintenance, mutation, and subversion of systems of power” (Shiel 4). As Shiel notes, it is important to acknowledge the mutual interrelation of cinema and the city since

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Cinema is […] best understood in terms of the organization of space: both space in films – the space of the shot; the space of the narrative setting; the geographical relationship of various settings in sequence in a film; the mapping of a lived environment on film; and films in space – the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as a cultural practice; the spatial organization of its industry at the levels of production, distribution and exhibition; the role of cinema in globalization. (5) While all these mutually intertwining aspects are of importance for the study of filmic spatiality, it is particularly “the mapping of a lived environment on film” that interests me in my discussion of Irish films on urban space and the role of the homeless in the example at hand. The figure of the homeless – a paradigmatically marginal figure – at the centre of a filmic narrative of urbanity offers impulses to rethink the filmic mapping of urban order and thereby can subject the relationship between cinema and the city to renegotiations. This in turn facilitates a critical interrogation of the city which, according to Mark Shiel, is “more so than the ‘nation’ […] the fundamental unit of the new global system which has emerged since the 1960s” (7). This is particularly interesting in the context of representations of the city in Irish films since the Republic of Ireland is not only a relative newcomer to the emergence of the said new global system, but has traditionally had a rather reluctant attitude towards its own few cityscapes which for a long time drastically contrasted the self-fashioning as a nation based on pre-modern rural and bucolic life and were therefore only occasionally embraced as settings in filmic representation before the late 1990s. Despite the literary influence of modernists such as James Joyce, the city was neglected as a site of the national. “The ‘country’ as represented within mainstream nationalist historiography, and in much of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and the visual arts, is the site of authentic Irishness” (Rockett 217; cf. also Cheng 28–61). Even in the 1920 and 30s, the few Irish films depicting Dublin city life suggested that “Dublin could be regarded as dangerous for both mind and body” (Rockett 220) – a tendency that can be observed up until the 1970s when Irish society started to continuously transform, with the prototypical image of the authentic Irish gradually shifting from the peasant to the disenfranchised working-class city dweller (cf. Rockett 223). However, cinematic mappings of the city were not yet ready to catch up with these shifting notions of Irishness due to a persistent lack of “‘tangible imagery’” of Dublin (ibid.). It was not until the late 1990s and early 2000s that Dublin as a “‘missing discourse’ in Irish visual culture” (McLoone 40) was reframed as a “new cityscape” by starting from the “changing contexts of affluence and consumption” (38).

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If, as Mark Shiel claims, the city is the defining unit of the global systems dominating our contemporary sense of self and belonging (cf. Shiel 7), and if the Irish have finally caught up with that conception of the city, then an Irish film focussing on two homeless heroin-addicted Dubliners must be considered a conspicuous and provocative artistic endeavour. After all, the odd sense of displacement that can be associated with the figure of the homeless can not only be interpreted as a challenge to mainstream representations of urban order, but might also challenge and undermine the fragile sense of urban identity recently embraced by the Irish. At a time when, as Martin McLoone has stated, Irish film finally gained a genuine sense of urbanity and shifted from the conservative bucolic imagery of previous filmic representations to more positive images of the city standing for the “hip hedonism” of an “affluent, sometimes complacent culture that valorises conspicuous consumption and wealth” in the cinematic construction of a “new cityscape” (38), homeless characters restlessly strolling through postCeltic Tiger Dublin might be read as a haunting echo2 of a time when Irishness did not imply “finding confident home-grown roots,” but was “associated with movement, even while being at ‘home’” (Fagan 118). “Movement in the nineteenth century”, as G. Honor Fagan argues, “meant dislocation, rupture and trauma in Ireland. […]. Emigration was, indeed, the national trauma. Today, movement means travel or working abroad or ‘coming home’” (ibid.). Thus, while Irishness was in the 19th century associated with an increased potential for what Judith Butler calls precariousness (Butler, Precarious and Frames), Irish society has steadily developed into a nation that for many could be associated with safety, commodity and, ultimately, a home to either rest at or come back to. While mobility might now be the free choice of wealthy citizens, Adam and Paul, the homeless characters in Abrahamson’s film, represent a form of restlessness that does not fit into this conception of mobility. Rather, as I argue 2 Indeed, a scene in Mark O’Halloran’s original shooting script (included as a pdf on the dvd) that did not end up in the final movie would have supported such an allegorical reading even more strongly. When Adam and Paul finally manage to score heroin, they stroll the city, ending up at the Famine Monument in the Dublin Docklands. The directions read: “Adam and Paul are at the famine monument. Paul is staring at the figures. Adam is bent double being sick. Paul thinks the figures are real” (O’Halloran 81). In this scene, then, the intoxicated Paul is literally being haunted by the life-sized bronze representations of the Great Famine’s starving victims, coming to life and intruding into the present in his heroin-induced hallucination. Thus, two moments in Irish history allegorically converge in the city’s topography that is inscribed with the traces of history.

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throughout this paper, they can be interpreted as a memento of precariousness that the film attempts to incorporate within the spatial order of cinematic Dublin by employing alternative strategies of framing marginal subjects. In the following, I will outline a concept of homelessness based on Judith Butler’s notions of precariousness and framing lives that can then be translated into an interpretative perspective on the spatial strategies of framing in Adam & Paul. 3

Homelessness: Framing Precarious Life

With respect to regulating forms of citizenship – that is, forms of proper national, political and legal belonging – David Morley states that “moral order has in fact been spatialised” (26). Citizenship has in history often been tied to property ownership, rootedness in place and, today, a fixed address. To be without a home, Morley argues, must therefore be regarded as a “traumatic experience” in a “home-centred culture” (26). The homeless person can thus be understood as an ultimately paradoxical figure in many respects. Being homeless not only means to be without shelter and without a fixed abode, it also means to be oddly out of place in a culture that is predominantly structured by a degree of fixity when it comes to tracing one’s identity and position in society. However, the lack of a fixed address, a place to return to for shelter and to be localised at, does not logically imply an increased mobility and sovereignty. While being homeless might call for a certain form of restlessness since one has to continually look for new options of shelter, these options are strictly limited by the prevailing urban order that bans homeless people from many public places. This leads to another paradox which concerns the perception of the homeless. Although they are a regular feature of any urban centre no matter how affluent, measures to control urban space usually go along with banning the homeless from public view. In one of the few studies of homelessness in Ireland, Kevin C. Kearns calls homelessness an “Irish urban disorder” and notes that homelessness is a problem for most nations precisely because of its high visibility – “the homeless obtrude boldly upon the urban scene in blatant public view. They stand indiscreetly as accusing symbols of the host society’s abject failure to provide for a deprived segment of the population” (217). Of course, being homeless cannot automatically be interpreted as a deliberate and intentional form of protest against social deficits. As the result of complex social and individual problems as well as spatial displacements, most homelessness is not a form

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of intentional political subversion.3 The way the homeless are perceived and interpreted in society, however, hints at yet another paradox: despite a lack of political agency, being homeless is more often than not perceived by the authorities as a “bold obtrusion,” and hence as a problem that has to be dealt with accordingly. The homeless are perceived as an obtrusion because they expose themselves and their privacy in a way that is deemed inadequate and even indecent in a space that is considered to be public, hence non-private. The sanitisation of the public image of an urban area usually also entails the removal of such obtrusive elements and consequently, the homeless are not welcomed as features in the visual representation of urban areas. The homeless are not only spatially displaced but are also visually displaced or even erased – they are situated beyond the frames of perception and therefore denied recognition. In that respect, Judith Butler’s notion of different forms of life that can be recognised as either “grievable” and therefore “livable” or “ungrievable,” provides a useful perspective (Frames 22). Butler considers human lives under the aspect of their precariousness, that is, their potential for vulnerability. Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, […]. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.” butler, Precarious 32

Butler argues that despite normative forms of framing that suggest otherwise, every human life is by definition precarious. But the ways of framing that ­constitute recognition can render certain marginalised forms of life as less “livable” or “grievable” – and more precarious. Butler calls for revised forms of recognising all lives in their inherent precariousness: “Indeed, there ought to be recognition of precariousness as a shared condition of human life […]. It is not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is coextensive with birth itself” (Frames 13–14). The homeless, then, by lacking proper forms of shelter and protection from the elements, and by dwelling on the margins of mainstream society, can be regarded as the epitome of precarious and ungrievable life that lacks adequate 3 In some individual cases of mental illness, it might not be easy to decide whether people actually want to be sleeping rough deliberately, while members of some subcultures like hippies, punks and squatters might be counted as ‘deliberately’ homeless or at least of no fixed abode.

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forms of framing and recognition. By exposing their precarious condition in a public space, then, they make visible both the unequal distribution of vulnerability and, at the same time, precariousness as a trait of all human lives. For the construction of the city as a public and therefore representative space, the homeless become a disturbing factor because they pose as an antithesis to everything this public urban space is designed to represent. The figure of the homeless person might subvert notions of what a city intends to convey of itself by defying norms of cleanliness and proper conduct in public, and instead highlights the fragility of existence, including physical and mental health and unequal economic distribution. In short, when the homeless enter the frame, they undermine the notion of the city as a safe and self-evident space for “livable” and “grievable” existences. Since, according to Steven Shaviro (cf. viii) and Mark Shiel (cf. 4), film is a medium working with and through the body and in the spatiality of the city, films granting marginal subjects such as the homeless a central position potentially challenge the systems of power reflected and maintained by filmic representations. 4

Filmic Spatialisations of Irish Life

While, as outlined above, the overwhelming economic success of the Celtic Tiger years saw the Irish gaining a renewed cultural self-consciousness that can be traced in the cultural production of these years, not all films released around the turn of the century affirmed this new national image. Whereas around the year 2000 films like Gerard Stembridge’s About Adam from 2000 or Elizabeth Gill’s Goldfish Memory from 2003 contributed to the filmic construction of a “new cityscape” (McLoone 38) that shows a Dublin “reduced to a few affluent streets, the characters’ impressive dwellings and a series of cafés and bars” (Holohan 105), other films, which offered a different and less optimistic view of Irish urban space, began to emerge during the mid-noughties, and especially after the gradual decline of the Celtic Tiger economic success around 2007/2008. To a certain extent, these films can be said to hearken back to elements that had previously been explored in a number of films from the 1970s and 1980s when, as Kevin Rockett has observed, transformations in Irish society made themselves felt in an increased artistic concern with “the urban sensibility” (223). However, as Rockett claims, these previous urban films did not manage to establish a considerable revision of Irish urban imagery since the old country/city dichotomy is never far away, even if it has been problematized by issues of class, and has been recast in terms of social status with the urban disadvantaged standing in for the rural as the authentic

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Irish. By celebrating the sense of community within the urban working class, parallels can be made to the putative authentic, earthy life in the Irish countryside. (223) In addition to this mere transposition of a sense of community from one place to the other, Rockett argues that during the 1970s and 1980s Dublin still lacked a certain sense of particularity that other frequently filmed cities would elicit on screen (cf. 223). For Rockett, the literary fiction of Roddy Doyle and the successful 1990s film adaptations of his novels such as Alan Parker’s The Commitments of 1991 and Stephen Frears’ The Snapper and The Van (from 1993 and 1996) particularly epitomise this representational double bind: While the cinematic focus on the urban Irish working class as an authentic embodiment of Irishness significantly increases, one can still detect a simultaneous “unremarkableness of place” (223) when it comes to cinematic depictions of urban working-class environments. The new kind of films focussing on the Irish urban scene emerging with Adam & Paul can be situated within this development in recent Irish film history. Yet, these new films set themselves apart not only from the aforementioned contemporaneous light-hearted mainstream narratives, but also from previous films from the 1970s and 80s that attempted to create a form of social realism by focussing on urban working-class experience rather than bucolic images of West-Irish country life. These new films not only offer a grittier alternative to popular filmic constructions of Dublin, but they also refuse to provide a sentimentalised image of working-class solidarity and community. Rather, these films depict the disintegration of communal life in the underbelly of the contemporary Irish “boomtown” and reframe the lives of contemporary Irish city dwellers as precarious. While director Lenny Abrahamson, in cooperation with his scriptwriter Mark O’Halloran, is not only responsible for Adam & Paul, but also for the 2007 film Garage as well as for the 2007 tv-miniseries Prosperity that focussed on the lives of Ireland’s outcast and those left behind during the economic success, Dublin’s gloomier side has lent itself as a backdrop for several films in recent years.4 The notion of Dublin as a spatialisation of a new Irish self-consciousness and the order of Irish citizenship is interrogated and re-framed in these films 4 While Adam & Paul and Prosperity can be considered genuinely urban films, Abrahamson and O’Halloran’s collaboration Garage offers a renegotiation of the village life in the prototypically Irish mid-west, and therefore of the other end of the spatial-cultural spectrum. What connects this film to the more ‘urban’ one discussed here is a similar sensibility for the cultural codes of Irish space. For detailed analyses of Garage, cf. O’Connell (2011) and Heinz/ Schmitt (2014).

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that, of course, are not restricted to the work of Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran, but are also exemplified by films such as Brendan Muldowney’s Savage from 2008 and Darragh Byrne’s Parked from 2010.5 By taking a more detailed look at Adam & Paul, I want to show how this new kind of Irish urban films renders Dublin’s urban order as a space of precariousness by employing the homeless as a figure of what the sociologist Imogen Tyler calls the “anti-citizen” (133), a figure that exists not only on the fringes of society, but has no real place within the city’s moral order whatsoever and is therefore an embodiment of precariousness. Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul is particularly important in that respect since it uses the motif of homelessness to encompass several problematic issues of contemporary Irish culture and reconstructs images of Dublin’s urban space by radically reframing forms of precarious life according to a cinematic poetics of spatial inversion. 5

Adam & Paul: Challenging Spatial and Corporeal Inscriptions of Order

Adam & Paul’s opening scene already provides the angle from which to interpret the entire film by highlighting its principles of inversion. It starts out with a shot that at first sight might suggest yet another film cashing in on the Irish rural idyll: a close-up showing leaves of grass swaying in the breeze in front of a sky that is not too promising of a sunny day. “This calls up the notion of Ireland as a natural landscape and hints at the ideal of an organic way of life […]” (Heinz 143). The following aerial shot, however, ironically renegotiates this notion by giving us the first view of the two main characters and already drastically exposes them in their deprived and precarious state, with

5 Muldowney’s Savage adapts the perspective of a man who falls victim to a gang robbery, leaving him castrated and traumatised. Throughout the film, Dublin is rendered as a space of constant threat, with all citizens leading potentially precarious lives. Like Adam & Paul, Parked is dealing with homelessness and drug addiction, focussing on a man living on an abandoned car park on the outskirts of Dublin. Apart from their apparent subject matter, these films, like Abrahamson’s, employ unique stylistic and formal features to render Dublin as a particularly dangerous and disintegrating cityscape. While the Dublin of more mainstream films appears to be a globalised, open city, Muldowney and Byrne convey a more claustrophobic impression of living in this city by predominantly using medium shots and close-ups that restrict the scope, and extreme colour filtering.

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the aerial perspective highlighting their vulnerability and their insignificance by rendering them as almost dehumanised elements scattered onto the landscape. This shot, showing them lying on a mattress in an open field, also plays with notions of homeliness – a notion that is usually closely linked to the safety of interiors. Adam (Mark O’Halloran) and Paul (Tom Murphy) are exposed to the elements and the dangers that such a situation entails. By showing them sleeping on a ragged mattress, but without shelter, even without a blanket, this shot mocks notions of home and offers a “parody of the domestic scene” (Holohan 118; cf. also Heinz 143) that turns spatial orders upside down: a scruffy wasteland is clearly not the designated space for a cosy and refreshing nap. Within the first few frames, the film thereby already establishes its poetics of inversion as well as its darkly comedic tone. The next shot further establishes the film’s notion of spatial order by providing a two-shot of Adam and Paul facing the city, with Adam asking “Where the fuck are we?”, indicating a sense of dislocation that is very likely to be mirrored by the disorientation of the implied audience which is not used to such views of Dublin, here being shown from the city’s very fringes. Thus, the film radically establishes its perspective as one from the margins of Dublin’s commonly known spatial order. As Conn Holohan argues, “marginalised social positions become central to the narrative of the city” in Abrahamson’s film (131), which thus suggests a “lack of a clear distinction between centre and periphery” (108). This is part of the broader poetics of inversion guiding the filmic narrative and its construction of space. According to Holohan, the film is dominated by a sense of “spatial ambiguity” (108) that is particularly conveyed by the depiction of the characters’ movements through urban space and the editing that visually connects various places of Dublin’s cityscape with each other and thus suggests an erasure of the actual spatial as well as the symbolic distance between the margins and the centre of the city, thereby destabilising the distinction between the two.6 To those who are familiar with the spatial and social make-up of Dublin, the following shots are more easily locatable: Adam and Paul are approaching the 6 In relation to this filmic construction of Dublin’s cityscape, Michael Patrick Gillespie likewise observes that “the urban environment encloses and directs the turmoil of the pair’s lives, defining social boundaries rather than delineating individual natures. […] Abrahamson’s motion picture develops episodically with only the cityscape of working-class sections of the town and the progression of time providing unifying transitions from scene to scene. (The technique of featuring the geography of lower-income Dublin neighbourhoods stands as characteristic of this genre, and it remains in sharp contrast to the predilection of middleclass films for highlighting tourist landmarks. Both choices underscore the way each type of Irishness functions in either category of film)” (109–110).

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Ballymun flats – “Dublin’s monument to misjudged urban planning” (Holohan 102), an infamous social housing project in the north of Dublin, close to the airport, with a reputation for poverty, insanitariness, drug problems and crime, and which is therefore the epitome of social problems and marginalisation within the city’s social geography. What is crucial about these shots is not only the framing of Dublin’s marginalised sites but also the way the main characters Adam and Paul are situated within the locale: at the beginning, most scenes are established with Adam and Paul entering the frame from the margins – an establishing method that is all the more significant when it happens in front of the backdrop of a monument that does not lend itself to a favourable image of Ireland’s capital. This peculiar way of rendering the two characters can be read with regard to Judith Butler’s observations concerning forms of framing lives and the significance of recognition. With Butler, one might say that the film lets the characters struggle for recognition by persistently entering frames that would otherwise exclude them – thereby, the film offers these precarious lives the opportunity to inhabit its frames. The film therefore can be said to “offer a space of recognition” and solicits what Butler calls a “transformative becoming” in relation to the framings of the hegemonic Other – it is what she calls “to stake one’s own being, and one’s own persistence in one’s own being, in the struggle for recognition” (Precarious 44). This is not to say, however, that the film shies away from showing the obstacles of the homeless characters’ precarious existence and from exploiting its comedic potential, for example when Paul is shown defecating in an alley for lack of proper sanitary facilities and an inability to control himself any longer. Scenes like these function within the film’s logic of inversion and exemplify the paradox of the homeless who obtrude on the public by exposing what otherwise is supposed to remain private (cf. Hickey and Schmitt 37; Kearns 217). What becomes visible in this scene in a painful and simultaneously grotesquely comic way is Paul’s vulnerability, and what is at stake is his dignity as a human being, as becomes evident in Paul’s own desperate whining: “I’m not having a shite down the lane – I’m not a fucking dog!” The incredulity with which Paul succumbs to his corporeal predicament is reflective of his own sense of human dignity as well as his acknowledgement of the boundary between public and private that he is unable to uphold in his homeless state. Thus, as Sarah Heinz remarks regarding this scene, “the loss of human dignity is connected to a loss of privacy and a lack of a homeplace in which ‘dirty’ actions like excretion can be kept from the public eye” (Heinz 145). Heinz further argues that “the fear of behaving like an animal, of being reduced to mere matter and losing the status as a human being is deeply ingrained in the protagonists” and is thus simultaneously reproducing the attitude of the cinema audience as spectators

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of this behaviour (forthcoming). Thus, scenes like this and many others in the film function within the logic of a “politics of disgust”: “bodily reactions such as disgust or fear of contamination are among the strongest means to create and maintain […] boundaries and notions of difference” (Heinz 137). This argument is in line with Steven Shaviro’s conviction that the “visceral, affective responses to film” (viii) are defining the very corporeal workings of power in the cinema: “It is in the flesh first of all, far more than on some level of supposed ideological reflection, that the political is personal, and the personal political.” (viii) Thus, the body is the cinematic surface and the medium of political agency and intervention. This notion likewise informs David B. Clarke’s and Mark Shiel’s theorisations of the relationship between cinema and the city outlined above. In Adam & Paul, one can consequently detect the intervention of individual bodies in the cityscape, and simultaneously how the city is mapped, that is, inscribed, onto these bodies. In this scene, Paul is entering a relationship with the cityscape through the humiliating exposure of his body in the act of excretion. He does something in a public place which is conventionally prohibited and transgresses the norms of urban space, sanitary conventions and civilised human behaviour. It is in this transgression that David Morley’s observation about the spatialisation of moral order becomes evident and manifest in its violation. As Craig M. Gurney argues, home is an “embodied space” “where you can be yourself” (7). Thus, “[t]he taboos which surround elimination activities are an established part of the civilizing process which has moved them back stage then off stage” (Gurney 62). Consequently, the “accommodation of bodies” (62) is closely linked to the civilising process. In that regard, the home is the place within the civilised spatial order where the human body is allowed to be and do what it is otherwise not allowed to do, which makes home “a place where bodies are both vulnerable and safe” (57). Since the homeless are being denied such a place, their bodies oppose civilised public order. By violating the taboo of excretion in public Paul seems to re-code the cityscape with his own vulnerable and “leaky” (55) body, but at the same time, the city’s order is paradoxically mapped onto him in the very moment of its transgression. This scene, with Paul reluctantly defecating “down the lane”, his face uncontrollably and grotesquely twisted in a child-like expression of disbelief, humiliation and embarrassment that contributes much to the cringe-inducing comedy of the scene, could be described by turning to Shaviro’s interpretation of Jerry Lewis’s “comedies of abjection” (107ff.): Most commonly, comedy liberates through aggression: the comedian achieves a kind of self-redemption by turning the tables on his or her

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tormentors, or simply by violating and overturning social taboos. Lewis’s comedy, however, moves in the direction not of liberation and redemption, but of utter abjection. What is more, this abjection undermines the integrity of the individual personality, and marks the point of an inscription of the social. The painful, negative emotions that surprisingly proliferate in Lewis’s movies are never those of an isolated self; they always imply the gaze and judgment of others. (108) The demonstration of Paul’s miserable and exposed state also functions in these terms, since he no longer represents a single individual but, through the conflicted immersion of the audience via simultaneously disgusting, abject and comic images of bodily disintegration, becomes an inscribed body representing a collective social order in the moment of its violation. Rather than becoming like a “fucking dog”, Paul is drastically infantilised in this scene, and can thus be likened to the comedic effects elicited by Jerry Lewis’s “embarrassingly infantile pleasures” (Shaviro 124). For Shaviro, it is particularly Lewis’s body and more specifically his facial expressions which mark his childlike “nonautonomy” that is an effect of the discrepancy between his behaviour and the social norms7 he transgresses: “In his spastic bodily movements as in his exaggerated facial expressions, he affirms the very nonautonomy that is both presupposed and dissimulated in the regime of the commodity” (123). Within the context of Adam & Paul, one might substitute the regime of civilised urban order for the “regime of the commodity” that Jerry Lewis is at odds with. Thus, Abrahamson’s film can be said to produce a Lewisian comic effect resulting from the conflicted inscription of social order onto an individual body. The body of the homeless Paul thereby becomes a signifier of the tension between subversion and affirmation of this order. Yet, Adam & Paul goes on to make this interrelation between the individual body and urban cultural order even more explicit, as becomes evident in two scenes that in terms of plot structure are at the centre of the film and thus form the culmination of the film’s strategy of inversion. 6

“Public Property”? Contesting the Social Sphere

The first of these scenes has Paul entering a shop intending to steal some food and drink and being approached and thrown out by the shop assistant, leading to a quarrel between Paul, the assistant and Karl, another homeless man. 7 In that respect, Shaviro highlights Lewis’s commodity fetishism (cf. 123).

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When Paul enters the shop, we see images of the shop’s surveillance cameras. In this instance, the film openly reflects and practically re-frames common forms of surveying the homeless in order to keep them from entering certain spaces in an attempt to maintain urban order. Such reflections show Dublin’s urban space to be a contested sphere, a battleground for different ideologies and forms of subjectification. The surveillance camera represents a hegemonic gaze that is not only serving the prevention of crime, but simultaneously frames human lives within the cityscape as either excluded from or included into the prevailing urban moral order. In the case of the unclean homeless Paul, the camera is an instrument of enacting the political function of what Imogen Tyler calls “disgust consensus” (Tyler 23) according to which Paul can be said to embody a form of “social abjection” (46). Since, according to Tyler, the order of a state is a “constellation of embodied practices” rather than an abstract set of qualities (46), it requires corporeal forms of inclusion and exclusion, with disgust being the emotional and physical reaction triggered by those elements which are supposed to be excluded from its order: “Disgust is not just enacted by subjects and groups in processes of othering, distinction-making, distancing and boundary formation, but is also experienced and lived by those constituted as disgusting in their experiences of displacement and abandon” (26). In the shop scene, the film illustrates a similar kind of social abjection that once more shows how such forms of order are spatially and corporeally inscribed. Here, the cityscape’s topography of social inclusion and abjection becomes evident in the quarrel between Paul and the assistant who wants to keep him from touching the bread with his “fucking filthy” hands since “people have to eat that.” In a bizarre twist, the film subsequently reveals the political and racial implications of this spatial order when Paul gets help from Karl, who yells at the assistant: “If we were black you wouldn’t be throwing us out!” Karl seems to believe that forms of racial discrimination would be less likely to happen than discrimination and marginalisation on the grounds of social class, implying that within Dublin’s increasingly multicultural society in the early 21st century, black people would be more privileged than a white Irish homeless man. While Karl’s accusation is politically and factually misled,8 it nevertheless hints at the 8 Of course, anti-black racism is far from being a phenomenon of the past in Ireland. In his study Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, John Brannigan invokes the following telling image: “On the morning of 7 June 2004, just a few days before the citizenship referendum, two men wearing balaclavas hung a life-sized black doll from a railway bridge in Longford town. A bag was placed over the doll’s head, and a sign hung around its neck which read ‘Niggers go home – you’ll never be Irish!’” (Brannigan 222). With regard to such events as well as

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fact that, as Eduardo Barros-Grela remarks regarding these scenes, “the margin itself has developed an internal hierarchy” (Barros-Grela 78). In that sense, Karl’s comment forms the build-up for the following scene which is not only central to the politics of the marginal depicted in the film, but is at the same time one of its comedic highlights. After Paul’s more or less successful attempt to rob the shop, he and Adam settle down on a bench where they encounter a Bulgarian immigrant. Reluctantly, the Bulgarian makes room for Paul to sit next to his friend, arguing that “I am sitting here first. I have my bag here. Is public property [sic].” In this scene, the bench becomes a metonymy not only of Dublin’s conflicting cultural spheres but also of Ireland as a whole. The quarrel over rightful belonging, “public properties,” and what space(s) to claim for oneself reveals the intersectional dimensions of race and class in contemporary Ireland as semantically inscribed in the cityscape of Ireland’s capital. Throughout the film it has been made clear that Adam and Paul belong to the lower classes of Dublin; they are socially abject9 – yet, they assume a privileged position in comparison with the Bulgarian immigrant based on racial and national belonging which becomes clear when Adam tells him to leave “our fucking country” and go “back to fucking Romania,” sparking the man’s outrage at being (once again) wrongfully identified as a Romanian. Marked by his darker skin tone and his broken English, the man is to Adam an illegal intruder into his cultural sphere: Ireland belongs to him, the rightful white Irish citizen who has a birth right to inhabit this country.10 The Bulgarian consequently subverts stereotypical notions of

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to the citizenship referendum that took place in the same year that Adam & Paul was released in Irish cinemas, Brannigan goes on to conclude that Irish society still “demands to be reimagined beyond the dubious and destructive allure of race” – thus, “[t]he future of a genuinely cosmopolitan Ireland will depend upon this capacity in Irish culture to imagine the concept of community, perhaps even nation, beyond the bounds of racial ideologies, and to realize an ideal of civic and social community which can harness the positive value of human dependencies beyond the terms of national or racial affiliation” (227). Sarah Heinz interprets Adam & Paul in terms of its representations of intersections of race and class, arguing that Adam and Paul can be considered as embodiments of an Irish white trash (139–142). As already remarked, the film can also be interpreted in relation to the ongoing debates regarding Irish citizenship at the time of its release. To quote John Brannigan once more on the issue: “The citizenship referendum of 2004, which explicitly targeted the right to citizenship of children born in the Irish Republic to ‘non-national’ parents, was resoundingly endorsed by the voting public (79 per cent). Clearly, then, the responsibility for racialised distinctions within Irish society is neither wholly the result of state action, nor is it merely the preserve of a recalcitrant xenophobic minority” (8–9).

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the “Eastern-European immigrant” by explaining that he has nothing whatsoever to do with Romania.11 Thus, he denaturalises stereotyped conceptions of ethnic markers. In the same way, Paul involuntarily denaturalises clichéd ideas of ethnicity and cultural relations when he talks about his assumptions that the man must be relieved to be in Dublin since Bulgaria must be a “shithole.” In a mixture of outrage and amusement, the Bulgarian explains: You stupid fucking Irish. Is it I am going fucking crazy? You listen to me now: Bulgaria is not a shithole. Beautiful. It is beautiful. And now, Dublin it is the shithole. Full of liars and fucking maniacs – and fucking Romanians. By being oblivious of identity categories that reach beyond the dichotomy of privileged Irish self and the immigrant other, Paul ignores his own precarious situation. In a further step, he highlights these imagined cultural and ethnic boundaries by referring to Adam’s jacket which was produced in Bulgaria and stands for the transnational market relations in a globalised world that flaunts standardised conceptions of ethnicity and cultural belonging: even Dublin’s homeless wear jackets produced in Eastern Europe. When the Bulgarian emphatically counters Adam’s question why he is in Dublin if he considers the city to be a “shithole” by replying: “Did you ever ask yourself the same question? Why are you here? Why the fuck are you here?”, he is not only articulating the film’s underlying existential questions, but also implicitly hints at the contingency of social orders inscribed onto their bodies and onto the cityscape. Apparently, Adam and Paul do not do much to earn their place in a society that enjoys the outcomes of a free market. If it comes to defining the “spongers” of the state, they are at least as likely to be accused of “sponging” as the immigrant who claims to have suffered such verbal abuse repeatedly during his time in Dublin. Abrahamson’s film can be regarded as a complex renegotiation of concepts of cultural belonging that reframes Dublin’s urban space as a sphere in which such issues are constantly contested and in which forms of precarious life are put to the front to subvert dominant cosy notions of an egalitarian and affluent ‘new’ Ireland. By focussing on the abject and grotesquely unruly bodies of the homeless that, for lack of a private space, are at odds with the moral order encoded in the text of the city, the film interrogates the mutual interrelation of the city and its cinematic representations. By inverting corporeal and 11

On a further comedic level, this becomes even more intriguing considering the fact that the actor playing the Bulgarian, Ion Caramitru, is actually a Romanian.

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urban order through framing marginalised lives and thereby exploding mainstream images of contemporary Dublin, Abrahamson’s film shows how this medium can work through the body (cf. Shaviro viii) in order to critically engage with the orders and systems of power conveyed by cinema’s spatialising practices. Works Cited Primary References

Adam & Paul. Dir. Lenny Abrahamson. Script: Mark O’Halloran. Element, 2004. Film. O’Halloran, Mark. Adam & Paul. Original Shooting Script. Element, 2004.

Research Literature

Barros-Grela, Eduardo. “Re-Defining Urban Identities in Contemporary Irish Film(s).” Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema. Ed. Werner Huber and Séan Crosson. Vienna: Braumüller, 2011. 67–80. Brannigan, John. Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture. Edinburgh up, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Butler, Judith. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Cheng, Vincent. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. New Brunswick: Rutgers up, 2004. Clarke, David B. “Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City.” The Cinematic City. Ed. David B. Clarke. London: Routledge, 1997. 1–18. Fagan, G. Honor. “Globalised Ireland, or, Contemporary Transformations of National Identity?” The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger. Ed. Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman. Manchester up, 2003. 110–121. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. The Myth of an Irish Cinema: Approaching Irish-Themed Films. New York: Syracuse up, 2008. Gurney, Craig M. “Accommodating Bodies: The Organization of Corporeal Dirt in the Embodied Home.” Organizing Bodies: Policy, Institutions and Work. Ed. Linda McKie and Nick Watson. London: Palgrave, 2000. 57–78. Heinz, Sarah. “Celtic Tiger Ireland and the Politics of Disgust: White Trash in Leonard Abrahamson’s Film Adam and Paul and Sebastian Barry’s Play The Pride of Parnell Street.” Narrating Ireland in Different Genres and Media. Ed. Katharina Rennhak. Trier: 2016. 133–145. Heinz, Sarah, and Mark Schmitt. “Blighted Past – Lost Future? Denaturalising Narratives of Rural Irishness in Leonard Abrahamson’s Garage and Patrick McCabe’s The Holy City.” nis: Nordic Irish Studies 13.1 (2014): 77–93.

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Hickey, Neil, and Mark Schmitt. “De-Claiming the Streets. Constructing and Surveying the Homeless in Ireland.” Hard Times: Deutsch-Englische Zeitschrift 87 (2010): 37–41. Holohan, Conn. Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film. Dublin: Irish Academic, 2010. Kearns, Kevin C. “Homelessness in Dublin: An Irish Urban Disorder.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 43.2 (1984): 217–233. McLoone, Martin. Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland: Cityscapes, Landscapes, Soundscapes. Dublin: Irish Academic, 2008. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. O’Connell, Dióg. “Immersed in Two Traditions: The Narratives of Adam & Paul, Garage, and Prosperity.” Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema. Ed. Werner Huber and Séan Crosson. Vienna: Braumüller, 2011. 115–126. Rockett, Kevin. “(Mis-)Representing the Irish Urban Landscape.” Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 217–228. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 1–18. Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed, 2013.

Chapter 8

In the Ghetto: Inequality, Riots and Resistance in London-Based Science Fiction of the Twenty-First Century Barbara Korte Abstract The August 2011 ‘riots’ in London and other cities in the United Kingdom were a widely noted expression of social discontent connected with new austerity programmes and increased precariousness and poverty. This essay concentrates on two science fiction texts – a novel and a film – that were published shortly before the August events but reflect the growing resistance from which the riots erupted. Both Jonathan Trigell’s 2011 novel Genus and the film Attack the Block (uk 2011, written and directed by Joe Cornish) engage with Britain’s social division through a powerful spatial metaphor: that of (real or imaginary) borderlines and specifically that of the ghetto as a walledoff district within a city where social and spatial segregation go hand in hand. Trigell’s novel, which is set in the near future, envisages a dystopian London in which the King’s Cross area has been transformed into an inner-city ghetto for the socially marginalised. Attack the Block is set in the present and uses the sci-fi trope of an invasion from outer space to re-imagine an existing urban space commonly associated with segregation and marginalisation: the inner-city council estate.

Keywords council estate – dystopia – Charles Booth – Guy Fawkes – inequality – King’s cross – Occupy – poverty – precariousness – science fiction – 2011 riots

1

Social Segregation and Science-Fictional Critique

As centres of commerce and capital, cities around the world have always been challenged by social inequality amongst their populations and it is common for social divisions to be reflected in city space. For Victorian Britain, this is illustrated quite literally by the famous colour-coded maps of London’s social © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_011

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composition in Charles Booth’s monumental Life and Labour of the People of London (1891–1902), where the East End and other low-income districts are clearly distinguished from the capital’s more wealthy parts. One could draw similar maps for all earlier and later periods in the history of London. Indeed, the idea that city space is socially segregated appears to be inscribed in the urban imaginary, and is therefore in danger of being taken for granted. However, the economic crisis of the twenty-first century with new austerity programmes and cuts in social welfare has widened social gaps again, raised a new debate about class difference (notably the alleged emergence of a new ‘underclass’) and made social inequality visible again. In Britain as in other countries with advanced economies, increased numbers of people live on the streets and have to queue up for shelter and food, and discontent manifests itself in public forms of resistance. The August 2011 ‘riots’ in London and other cities in the United Kingdom are a case in point,1 as are the Occupy London protests against inequality and corporate influence on the steps of St Paul’s in late 2011 and early 2012. These protests brought Guy Fawkes – re-interpreted as a symbolic face of anti-capitalist resistance2 – back to the capital whose King and Parliament he had attempted to blow up four centuries previously. Both the riots and the Occupy protests were forms of spatial practice: the first a seemingly spontaneous invasion of high streets which led to unpremeditated lootings, the second an organised but no less provocative presence in an iconic place close to the banking district. Both instances were visible not only in the city but also in the media since they were widely reported and discussed in the news and other forms of journalism. Indeed, documentarism and more widely realism appear to be the dominant mode in which social conflict and protest have been represented since the nineteenth century, whether in reportage, photography, film, or the novel. Fictional representation can also, however, transcend and even resist a simple realism in order to provoke its audiences’ habituated modes of perception and reaction. One way to achieve this is the projection of today’s status quo into the possible worlds of fantasy and science fiction. The fantasy genre has generated various visions of alternate Londons in recent years, and in some of them social inequality is a prominent theme. For instance, Neil Gaiman’s genre classic Neverwhere from 1998 and Terry Pratchett’s Dodger from 2012 portray London’s 1 By now the riots immediately sparked a wave of analysis and interpretation. See, for instance, the publications by Bloom, Briggs, Lammy and “Reading the Riots.” 2 The stylised mask of Guy Fawkes, adopted by Occupy and other social protest movements, was popularised through the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s 2006 graphic novel, V for Vendetta.

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underground of Tube tunnels and sewers as an unexpectedly empowering environment for an alleged ‘under’ class whose ‘belowness’ is systematically deconstructed.3 While these fantasy novels discuss social inequality in terms of an established vertical spatial metaphor (‘up’ and ‘below’4), the two science fiction pieces that are at the core of the following discussion – Jonathan Trigell’s 2011 novel Genus and the feature film Attack the Block (uk 2011, written and directed by Joe Cornish) – engage with social division through another powerful image: that of (real or imaginary) borderlines and specifically that of the ghetto as a walled-off district within a city where social and spatial segregation go hand in hand. Both novel and film were published a few months before the riots broke out. While they were thus not inspired by the August 2011 events, they appear to reflect the spirit of discontent and growing resistance from which the riots erupted. What the two examples share besides this background is their use of science fiction as a genre concerned with “progressive alternatives to the status quo, often implying critiques of contemporary conditions or possible future outcomes of current social trends” (Csicsery-Ronay 113), i.e. as a genre that has significant overlaps with utopian or more frequently dystopian speculation. In this understanding, science fiction “has always had sympathies with the marginal and the different” (Roberts 18), and it is unsurprising that its critique has targeted capitalism, (neo)colonialism as well as economic and social inequality. It is worth pointing out that the strained economic situation in Britain has even led journalists to use extrapolation as a means of social critique: in December 2011, a few months after the riots, the Guardian ran a series on “The uk in 2017” – 2017 being the projected end of the government’s austerity 3 For discussions of Neverwhere see Tiffin and Korte. Another piece of cult fantasy fiction, Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London from 2011, is not concerned with social inequality, but deserves a note in the context of this volume because resistance is a conspicuous theme here. A mixture of fantasy and police procedural set in the present, Rivers of London raises the theme of resistance through the anarchic Mr Punch, who comes to life in the plot. Aaronovitch radicalises the traditional puppet figure that clashes with all figures of authority, and turns him into an enemy of almost terrorist dimensions. The blurb of the paperback edition emphasises the spirit of resistance and riot in this novel with a statement by the first-person narrator: “There’s something festering at the heart of the city I love, a malicious, vengeful spirit that’s taking ordinary Londoners and twisting them into something awful; mannequins to act out its drama of violence and despair. The spirit of riot and rebellion has awakened in the city, and it’s falling to me to bring order out of chaos – or to die trying.” 4 See, for instance, the telling title of George Gissing’s 1889 novel The Nether World, which is set in the East End slums, and, of course, the underground existence of the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine from 1895.

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programme that entailed palpable social cuts. An article in the series (published on 2 December) projects a bleak vision of the capital under the title “London: An Urban Neo-Victorian Dystopia”. Seen retrospectively, the London of 2011 is here described as the starting-point of urban decline and a regress to Victorian dimensions of social division – all this with significant consequences for London’s socio-spatial composition: London, once known for its diversity, became progressively more socially and economically segregated after the 2011 austerity measures kicked in, triggering six years of social upheaval that changed the city forever. By 2015, academics had coined the phrase ‘urban neo-Victorian dystopia’ to describe the dramatic social and spatial changes in the city they had begun to compare, with only a little exaggeration, with the London described by Charles Dickens 160 years earlier. The housing benefit reforms of 2012 and 2013 had swept tens of thousands of lower income families out of inner London, to the fringes of the capital and beyond to Margate, Hastings, Milton Keynes and Luton. This triggered an inexorable and progressive separation of rich and poor in the capital and helped unleash a wave of social problems. It was boom time for some privileged areas, such as the string of wellto-do neighbourhoods stretching along the north bank of the Thames from Westminster and Notting Hill to Hammersmith that estate agents dubbed the ‘Golden Westway’. […] By 2017 the last council-owned social housing properties in Westminster were sold under the 2011 right-to-buy scheme. […] Outside the wealthy centre, things were less serene. Riots sporadically broke out and right-wing bloggers increasingly warned about the suburban menace of unemployed young people. butler

If journalists thus engage with speculative fiction, it is hardly surprising that novelists and filmmakers have taken the uk’s new social divide as an incitement to think about possible outcomes for the country. Significantly, both Genus and Attack the Block ask how inequality can – or cannot – be resisted in spaces that are fenced off from London’s more affluent parts – not necessarily by material demarcations but through social practice and social perception. Trigell’s novel, which is set in the near future (like the Guardian’s series of articles), envisages a dystopian London in which the King’s Cross area has been transformed into an inner-city ghetto for the socially marginalised. Attack the Block is set in the present and uses the sci-fi trope of an alien invasion to

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re-imagine an existing urban space commonly associated with segregation and marginalisation: the council estate. 2

No Resistance from the Other Within: Jonathan Trigell’s Genus

Jonathan Trigell’s novel is a cross-over from science fiction into literary fiction that leans towards dystopia. In its near-future scenario, the uk is the only part of Europe not occupied by Muslim invaders, and the religious wars in which the country was engaged have led to wide-spread secularisation. Religion as an institution for guarding ethical values has become suspect and been systematically disempowered, and politics has likewise lost its social conscience and allowed itself to be dominated by corporations, specifically an all-powerful genetics industry. As mentioned above, the novel’s main setting is the King’s Cross area, which was associated with drug trafficking and prostitution until the late twentieth century but then experienced significant regeneration and upgrading during the early 2000s. In Trigell’s vision, this positive development is reversed, King’s Cross having degenerated once more and become The Kross – a ghetto for the underprivileged, for criminals and a handful of bohemians: The Kross wasn’t always this ghetto, filled with the other, the excluded, the feared. Once it was an area similar to the rest of London. But between the first two Caliphate Wars, when the refugee trains started pouring through the now long-blocked Channel Tunnel to St Pancras and the surrounding streets became near permanently filled with anxious hungry families awaiting assistance, the better-off Londoners moved further out. trigell 90

Holman Prometheus, one of the novel’s protagonists and main focalising figures, is a painter, small and disabled with “crippled legs” (32) like Toulouse Lautrec, and with a “rare skill for bringing to life the inhumanity of mankind” (7). Although he derives from a wealthy family, he first moved to The Kross in the hope of sanctuary. Some instinctive sense that he would blend in better. He had seen that the strange were more numerous there: the detritus from the closed-down communes, burdened with religion as well as imperfection; some elderly early failures; the dated, the cheap and the dull; the charity packs; and the ragged remnants of the city’s Unimproved still lingered in the streets round that Elizabethan railway station. The Kross had become a beacon for the genetic underclass. (5)

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As this passage already spells out, the world of the novel radicalises present-day inequality because its social divide between a dominant class and an ‘underclass’ is rooted not (only) in economics but also in genetics: genetic engineering has created a new borderline between haves and have-nots, gene-rich and gene-poor. The genetically improved have beauty, health and money, while the unimproved are multiply deprived. Society is thus marked by “[a]n apartheid not just for opportunity, but of the very building blocks of life” (29). The genetics industry has been privatised and monopolised by Prometheus Industries – a firm founded by Holman’s grandfather, which makes the former’s genetically unimproved state ironic and tragic at the same time; driven by a proverbially Promethean hubris, his elderly father, also a geneticist, had deemed it impossible that he might sire a naturally ‘defective’ child. What is also ironic, of course, is the way in which the Prometheus geneticists profane the example of their mythological namesake: the classical figure brought the gift of fire to all of humankind, but the latter-day Prometheuses reserve their ‘gift’ – the power to interfere with life they have ‘stolen’ from God or Nature – for those who can pay for it. Humankind is now divided, unequalised, as life opportunities can be bought: But what you can say is that when parents are selecting characteristics, they go first of course for what they can afford of health, looks, intelligence and athleticism; and then, if they’re filthy rich, more complex bundles like energy, confidence, determination, nerve. […] There will be no equal access to artificial fertilization and gene-selection technology, not even the basic disease-immunity packs – the cheapest ‘charity packs’ – which the most moderate Levellers were calling for. (27) The Levellers are a religiously motivated equality protest movement whose call for charity is widely unheard since the social emotions are generally not much in demand any more: “Words like compassion, tolerance and empathy don’t even appear in the brochures [of Prometheus Industries]” (ibid.), and the government fails to provide even minimum ‘equality’ because it is under corporate influence: “The power is all in the hands of the enriched. They pay lip service to equal rights, but what use is having an equal right to apply for a job if you are less able? You still won’t get it.” (29) An inequality that is now biological and hence irreversible has rendered the older – our present – discourse of inequality obsolete, including the vision that it might be left behind completely: Social mobility is an historic term, self-improvement an extinct expression; all the improvement you are ever likely to achieve is acquired from

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people like those in Prometheus Industries. Privilege is bought before birth. Ability and life chance comes on a sliding scale according to how much your parents could pay. (30) The strict social division in Trigell’s novel coincides with spatial segregation within the city: the improved live in London’s better areas, while the unimproved and impoverished concentrate in the overpopulated Kross, which has become an Other within the city – a place that is paradoxically ‘outside’ the city even though it is right in its midst: “Though right in London’s centre, like a rotten yolk, The Kross is now extra muros, outside the walls; like the anarchic Montmartre once was to Paris […].” (90) The Kross is not only paradoxically ex-centric within the centre, however; it has also become increasingly insecure since it is largely left to itself. Those who are supposed to be agents who ensure order only practice violence. This is conveyed from the point of view of Detective Günther Charles Bonnet, who stems from a family of continental refugees and who has to investigate a series of mysterious deaths in The Kross: “The police can’t control this district any more; they victimize and brutalize, overreact when they catch, leave bruises and grudges.” (44) Drug trafficking is “more than tolerated” by the authorities since drugs “keep the urban underclass contented in their genetic and financial poverty” (31). The Kross is quite obviously a ghettoised space, but it is social practices and social perceptions that fence The Kross off from the rest of London rather than actual walls. Inhabitants of The Kross are not forbidden to leave their district, but Holman is one of the few people to traverse the Kross’s borders habitually to visit London’s wealthy areas, where his mother lives. More typically, the Kross’s inhabitants appear not to trespass its invisible borders, and their spatial practice thus leads to a form of self-containment that works into the hands of those in power. Conversely, those who occasionally cross its borders from without treat The Kross as a space whose otherness provides the thrill of the exotic and forbidden: “Some Improved come down for the frisson of slumming it, to buy drugs, to fuck, to play at impecuniosity. A few own businesses. But mostly The Kross is peopled with scum. Scum like an algae or an oil slick, pointless pollution on the surface of the gene pool.” (65) While the social contempt of the gene-rich is scandalous, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of The Kross is to what extent its inhabitants seem to have accommodated themselves to their condition. However, the suppressed anarchic potential of The Kross, bred by widespread frustration, is released spontaneously one night when, occasioned by a general blackout, the inhabitants loot shops in their area on a grand scale. A discontent that originates in corporate greed and an inability to buy ‘improvements’ finds vent, paradoxically, in a bout of unbridled consumerism:

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It wasn’t long before haphazard-stacked shopping-trolleys were clattering down The Kross’ tired tarmac streets. Streets soon strewn with goods too heavy to be carried far, abandoned for lighter spoils, or upon sight of a newer busted-open door. […] Fridges and washing machines, like boxy cartoon characters, staggered along with legs beneath them. Mannequins were dragged through smashed windows, stripped bare by thirsty lovers. Angle grinders treated steel shutters like wrapping paper. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you all. Welcome to the world of whim. Welcome to the world of wealth. Police lunged into the crowds but the revellers danced around them to re-form on the other side, like the fractal ballooning of fish schools about clumsy predators. In The Kross it was a carnival; a Mardi Gras to which the sirens and flashing lights only added. (75f.) The passage conveys the short-lived ecstasy of the looters, and Holman, almost overrun by the crowd, is bewildered by the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. This scene in particular fascinated several readers because it appeared to anticipate the riots in London whose outbreak was just as unexpected and eruptive as that in the novel.5 Like these actual riots, the lootings depicted in the novel receive wide media attention but do not lead to positive change. Indeed, when Holman in the passage above perceives The Kross’s spontaneous act of resistance as “a carnival” and “a Mardi Gras”, this emphasises its quality as only a temporary outbreak from the status quo. Despite its temporal containment, however, the outbreak receives a drastic reaction from the gene-rich and their conservative media. They see “long-held suspicions” confirmed by mobbish behaviour and identify The Kross as a severe risk to their own security: “the Unimproved are to be feared; they are not a part of what British society has become; they belong to a different age or a different place; they lack guilt, therefore they aren’t fully human; they are animals. They are other.” (78f.) The process of othering described here could not be more radical: the Unimproved appear to be different in terms of their temporality, their spatiality – and their actual species.

5 On Goodreads, for instance, ‘Emily’ commented on 20 August 2011: “Really enjoyed it. Especially as some parts seem spookily-relevant with relation to recent riots in the uk.” ‘Joanna Penn’, on 14 August 2011, found that: “The riots in London this last week and the right wing politics of (a) welfare parents should have fewer children (b) class separation between haves and have nots along with the images of fire, burning, arrests, looting and chaos all fit dramatically into this book. It felt I was reading something almost prescient.”

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In his novel, Trigell exaggerates bigoted opinions about lower-class and poor people voiced in Britain today and disseminated by right-wing popular media – precisely that “demonisation” which Owen Jones disapproves of in his widely noted analysis of Britain’s new contempt for “chavs”. Genus renders at length a pastiche newspaper column about the blackout lootings, which Holman reads in his mother’s garden. It ascribes to the rioters envy of the rich, thus suggesting that the rich are victims of ‘wrong’ social emotions and that the poor are ungrateful. Their protest is callously presented as lacking ‘true’ motivation since they are not starving, after all, and they are held to be solely responsible for their condition since they are allegedly lazy and unambitious – a traditional reproach against the poor at least since the Protestant work ethos emerged: These ‘people’ weren’t hungry, writes a columnist inside, they didn’t loot to eat. They looted because they think they merit ever more. By supporting the dregs of our society, by not requiring enough of them, we have created a strata of people who do nothing, who achieve nothing, who do not even seek to invest in their children so that they might one day amount to something. There is a sector within our city, it is becoming clear, who think that they are owed a living and who, even when given that, will not hesitate to steal more for themselves. (111; italics in original) In the article, such thinking leads almost effortlessly to dangerous biological and unashamed biopolitical reasoning. As creatures living on the lower end of the evolutionary scale, the columnist suggests, people living in The Kross should be gotten rid of: The streets of The Kross need to be cleaned, not just of the detritus from the carnage its inhabitants have wreaked, but of their attitudes, their very mind sets and (dare I say it?) their very make-up. Can we continue to live with these relics of another time in our midst? Britain spearheaded the second enlightenment, the genetic enlightenment, we fought and won wars costly in our children and our treasure to secure this future free from insidious religious superstitions. Can we now continue to live with peoples of the dark ages, those who outbreed us by breeding like beasts? Or lower perhaps than that, when even the cows in the fields and the pigs in the sties have all been selected for their qualities, have been enhanced and inseminated with care and cost, unlike some bottom feeders in our inner cities. […]

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Something now needs to change in Albion; the beautiful British people cannot thrive while we fight a second front within our isle. Our green and pleasant land has been sullied by a primeval ooze, the slime of riot and disorder, which should have been long left behind. (111f.; italics in original) Such patriotic rhetoric is ridiculously unaware not only of its own unenlightenedness, but also its own belatedness: it works with evolutionary and SocialDarwinist arguments at a time when natural evolution has been outwitted by genetics. It is one of the most distressing suggestions raised by Trigell’s dystopia that even such ridiculous ideology cannot be resisted. Social inequality alone might be countered, but the inscription of inequality into the genetic code, into life itself, has created a situation that could only be reversed, if at all, by fundamental and sustained political action against genetic manipulation. In the world of the novel, however, such action is nowhere in sight. The Levellers are portrayed as well-meaning but inefficient idealists, and the act of a religious extremist against Prometheus Industries – more successful than Guy Fawkes, he manages to blow up the tower of the firm’s headquarters – causes destruction and death but will also not alter the system. Indeed, at the end of the novel, it is revealed that the mysterious deaths in The Kross have been caused not by a socially deviant serial killer but by a deadly virus, for which the border-crossing Holman was used as an unwitting carrier. While the Improved are immune, most of the Unimproved are unlikely to survive, and the “rotten yolk” within the city and ‘Albion’ may indeed be on the way to extinction. Meanwhile, an actual wall is erected around The Kross, and its potential for resistance now seems finally contained. The precise, impressive measures given for the wall and its trench support the impression that there is little hope for improvement: A wall is being erected around the wasteland, blocking out the sign that read Everything Will Be All Right In The End. The finished sections of the wall are eight metres high. In front, military engineers in armoured bulldozers – cages over the windows like late-night synth shops – have dug a trench, four metres wide and four metres deep, and between the pit and the barrier laid a stretch of sand, to show the footprints of anyone who comes too close. The wall is rising fast. Lorries arrive suspension-sunk with prefabricated sections. ‘Prefabricated when?’ Crick asks.

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Because there is an unmistakable sense that this has all been planned ahead. […] The authorities say this is a temporary but necessary internment, until the malevolent elements can be identified. Until the enemy within is withouted. The wall on the wasteland does not look temporary. (252f.) The Kross has thus become a veritable ghetto with material borders that are unlikely to disappear, and Trigell’s novel eventually paints a society in which resistance against inequality has come too late. 3

Resistance in the Face of the Other Without: Attack the Block

Attack the Block does not only play with tropes of popular science fiction and action movies,6 but also with conventions of British council-estate fiction, i.e. novels and films that are set in social-housing estates and can be considered a contemporary equivalent to Victorian social-problem novels. As Susanne Cuevas writes in her analysis of the literary varieties of this kind of fiction, council estates have recently moved back into the media spotlight and onto the political agenda in the context of concerns about the rise of an underclass, increasing violent crime and ethnic segregation. […] In February 2007, a government-commissioned report into the future of council housing found that half of all social housing is concentrated in the poorest 20 per cent of neighbourhoods in Britain and that more than 50 per cent of social housing tenants of working age are without paid work. cuevas 383

Contemporary cultural production tends to paint council estates as derelict, vandalised, bleak and concrete environments that are peopled by the socially and ethnically marginalised, haunted by criminal behaviour and not a good place to grow up in. It is common to show how their inhabitants rarely leave the estate and how few people – apart from the police and social workers – come in from outside. Another borderline seems to run between those depicted in estate fiction and those who read or watch it: the latter are unlikely 6 It may have been inspired by the popular success of the satirical science-fiction film District 9 (usa/sa/nz 2009, directed by Neill Blomkamp), which is set in a Johannesburg slum and also involves aliens.

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to live on estates themselves, so that a social divide appears to be part of the generic pattern. This divide is laid open in a book by Tim Pritchard (otherwise a documentary filmmaker) which shares with Attack the Block an interest in young people’s life on a London council estate. In Street Boys: 7 Kids, 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood from 2008, Pritchard narrates the life stories of seven young black children who grow up in Brixton’s Angell Towers and join the gang on their estate. The foreword by one of the boys, JaJa, addresses the reader as a social (and presumably racial) other and announces that: This book is the voice of the streets. An unheard voice. This is when you leave those voices unheard, when you leave kids out there with no help and no support, and no choices or nothing. This is what happens. Your kids could be me. Your kids could go through the same things that I went through. I want you to understand what is out there, what young people like me are going through and why we are doing it. It’s a big cry for help, now. pritchard iv

Some hope arrives for Pritchard’s children when they establish a recording studio on the estate and form a rap group named Poverty Driven Children in order to be able to voice protest against their situation, but the book ends with an afterword that again pleads for help: “What I’m saying is that when I wanted to go on the straight and narrow there wasn’t much support. […] It’s just us against the world. We need help. Please help us.” (Pritchard 314) Attack the Block raises some of the issues addressed in Pritchard’s book, but its approach is more humorous and its view more utopian. The film is set on the fictitious Clayton Estate7 but was shot on authentic location in Heygate Estate in South London, which was demolished between 2011 and 2014. At first sight, a social realism characteristic of estate fiction seems to be the aim of Attack the Block, but typical elements of that fiction, and stereotypes generally 7 The film’s playful approach to sci-fi is revealed – for the genre connoisseur – in the naming of the estate’s buildings and streets after prominent British representatives of science fiction: “The areas and surrounding roads are named after well-known British science fiction authors: Wyndham Tower (John Wyndham); Moore Court (Alan Moore); Huxley Court (Aldous Huxley); Wells Court (H.G. Wells); Clarke Court (Arthur C. Clarke); Ballard Street (J.G. Ballard); Adams Street (Douglas Adams); Clayton Street and Clayton Estate (Jo Clayton); and Herbert Way (Frank Herbert)” (“Attack the Block”).

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associated with council estates, are then subverted. In particular, the film adopts a different position in terms of helping. The film’s young protagonists, some black, some white, could certainly do with more support from outside to overcome some of the negative sides of their environment, but they are also capable of helping themselves – up to the point where they perform resistance with an agency of action-film dimensions. It is precisely through its sci-fi component that the film can enact this resistance and at the same time ‘alienate’ its presumably middle-class spectators from their habitual ways of perceiving estates, namely through the established frame of problem-orientated representations in the media and in fiction. As a matter of fact, alienation takes place quite literally when ‘the block’ is attacked, not insignificantly on Guy Fawkes’ Night, by evil-minded aliens from outer space – possibly as an overture to a more widespread attack on the country at large. The unlikelihood of this plot device is pointed out in the film itself when a girl asks incredulously: “What kind of alien, out of all the places in the whole wide world, would invade some shitty council estate in South London?”, and gets the answer: “One that’s looking for a fight” (49:12). And a fight, heroic resistance, is what the aliens get from the group of teenage boys who are at the centre of the aliens’ attention because they have picked up pheromones from the first alien they have killed and are thus an easy target for the others. The aliens’ attack forces the children to turn the violent habits and criminal energy they have already acquired on their estate not against things and other people there or against the police, their arch-enemy,8 but against an opponent who renders all the usual demarcations and conflicts within their part of London insignificant. In order to deconstruct them, however, the film first has to establish these demarcations and conflicts. It does so with images that confirm ideas about the urban estate as a claustrophobic and dangerous living space. The camera shows the typical concrete environment with towering high-rises, and since it is already dark, its empty streets and passages look particularly threatening. The sense that the estate has an invisible borderline is established when we see a young white woman walking from the well-lit and peopled Oval underground station in Lambeth towards and then into the dark, empty estate, where she is immediately mugged by the gang of boys whose leader is aptly named Moses (played by John Boyega). Armed with a knife, they rob her of her 8 This antagonism between estate and police as well as other authorities is so great that the boys briefly even suspect that the aliens might have been created by the authorities: “Government probably bred those creatures to kill black boys […]. We ain’t killing each other fast enough, so they decided to speed up the process.” (50:48–51)

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phone, purse and a ring. The young woman, Samantha (‘Sam’) Adams (played by Jodie Whittaker) is a nurse, and her demeanour and accent identify her as middle class and out-of-place in the estate. She is quite obviously afraid of the boys and calls the police for protection, thus confirming the social borderline between them and herself – even though she lives in a flat in the estate. The boys’ attack upsets her so much that an elderly white woman has to take her home. This woman also sees the boys as a threat and complains that “the kids” are not afraid of the police any more: “‘Walking around with knives, great big dogs, like they own the block. Excuse my French, but they’re fucking monsters, ain’t they?’”, and Sam confirms: “‘Yeah, fucking monsters’” (08:24–08:36). Sam feels alien in the estate, and already plans to move away – an option which the boys who threaten her do not have and presumably also do not want because they consider the estate their territory. In a dialogue sequence later in the film, when the alien attack has already forced them into an alliance (“‘we’re on the same side now’”, one of the boys tells Sam, 37:52) the boys explicitly challenge Sam’s negative attitude towards their block: “‘Thinking of moving.’ ‘Shame. Why?’ ‘I don’t like the area.’ – ‘What do you mean, don’t like the area?’” (41:07) Faced with such and other questions from the boys,9 Sam’s preconceptions about the estate and those who live there are destabilised. She, and with her the audience, are taken through a learning experience as far as class prejudices and thinking in ghettoised categories are concerned. Sam and the spectators learn to appreciate the boys’ wit, courage and, in fact, heroism; two of them even give their lives while defending their territory and, by implication, the entire nation.10 Conversely, the boys learn that middle-class people are not there only to be mugged but can actually be their allies. They need Sam to treat their injuries and also as a co-fighter because, in contrast to them, she has not taken on the alien pheromones and can therefore help to prepare Moses’s decisive act (after which he is shown in an action-hero pose, hanging from a Union Jack): he lures the aliens into a gas-filled flat and blows it up with Guy Fawkes’ Night fireworks.

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For instance, the boys also challenge Sam’s complacent pride in the fact that her boyfriend helps poor children in Africa, and reveal it as an instance of the ‘telescopic philanthropy’ which Dickens already famously criticised in Bleak House (Chapter 6): “Oh, is it. Why can’t he help the children of Britain? Not exotic enough, is it? Don’t get no nice suntan.” (1:05:00–1:05:17) This ‘true’ heroism stands in contrast to the violent behaviour the boys mistake for heroism earlier in the film – a notion for which they are castigated by Sam: “‘We’re heroes, innit?’ – ‘Heroes? Five of you and a knife against one woman? Fuck off!’” (49:58–50:02).

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The aliens’ attack on the block can thus be seen as an important catalyst for a change in social relations and the formation of cross-class relationships. Lower-class estate kids and a middle-class woman have resisted the aliens, an unexpected common enemy, side by side. The aliens’ attack not only explodes credibility but all established assumptions and prejudices about ‘the block’. As one of the boys puts it: “this ain’t got nothin’ to do with gangs. Or drugs. Or rap music. Or violence in video games.” (41:50) The film does not gloss over the estate’s negative sides; gang violence, vandalism and drug trafficking (if in a more harmless variety) are shown to happen, but this is countered by the portrayal of the boys’ solidarity, resilience, wit and courage, as well as the fact that at least some of them are shown to be part of caring rather than stereotypically dysfunctional families. Because Sam has fought with the boys, overcoming her impulse to reject them as a threat to her security, she now knows that the estate has community values and is a living space worth being defended. When, in a final ironic twist of the action, Moses and his friend ‘Pest’ are arrested by the police who hold them – and not the aliens – responsible for the havoc on the estate, Sam takes their side and joins the protesters from the estate who try to prevent the arrest: “They’re my neighbours. They protected me”. This is a complete reversal from the position she had adopted at the beginning of the film. Resistance against the enemy from outer space appears to have made all earthly demarcations and conflicts insignificant and brought ‘two nations’ together. That the action is set on Guy Fawkes’ Night might implicate that the resistance depicted in the film is ‘carnivalesque’ and thus temporarily restricted. However, since the film shows its protagonists going through a learning experience, it seems to suggest that resistance can have long-term effects. Having encountered real aliens, Sam will no longer consider herself an alien on the estate, nor will she be perceived as an alien by the boys. This is a straightforward, simple message, and one needs to remember that the film targets not only an adult, but also a younger audience.11 Its utopian vision that the right kind of resistance can even make a council estate a better place, and help to make borderlines between the classes more permeable, has an obvious didactic impetus. The last images and the final soundtrack of the film avoid too harmonious a note, showing Moses and ‘Pest’ victorious but in a police van, while a protest song performed by Richie Spice is heard in the background: “Youths Dem Cold”.12 Nevertheless, Attack 11 12

The film was rated fit for viewing by persons aged 15 years or more; its dvd release has a junior as well as a senior commentary. “Youth Dem Cold”. The refrain goes “In the streets it’s getting hot, / And the youths dem a get so cold. / Searching for food for the pot, / They’ll do anything to fill that gap.” The song

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the Block, with its fresh tongue-in-cheek manner and play on representational conventions, subverts the conventional rhetoric of social demarcation and spatial segregation associated with council estates to project a utopia in which resistance can be constructive and lead to positive change – especially when the middle classes join the protest against inequality and social divisions. The film’s use of science fiction thus differs significantly from the bleak, dystopian future projected in Genus, where all resistance appears to have become futile. Arguably, the more hopeful outlook of Attack the Block and its positive assessment of resistance are typical of fiction for young adults. This is also suggested by a recent near-future novel by Melvin Burgess, The Hit from 2013, which was quite obviously inspired by the 2011 riots. While being predominantly concerned with the effects of a cult death drug, The Hit has a strong theme of social division, discontent and protest against profit and greed. It is set in Manchester, a city with a long history not only of capitalism but also of social protest (from the demonstrations that led to the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, to the Hunger Marches of the early twentieth century). The stark division between rich and poor in the novel’s world leads to protests – instigated by the Zealots, who seem to be modelled on Occupy protesters13 – that include riots and lootings. The second chapter, “Manchester Burning”, depicts the outburst from the perspective of its two adolescent protagonists: Only a few hours ago the future had seemed so fixed. All the money was owned by the banks and the big corporations, the economy was falling apart, there were no jobs, social services were a joke. For decades everyone had complained but nothing had changed. Now, suddenly, it

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ends with the following lines: “As generation comes and goes, / You got to make preparations while the youths dem grow. It’s what you reap, it’s what you sow, / The youths them have a life in the future, / So when that’s then you know. / If education is the key, / Then tell me why the bigger heads have to make it so expensive for we. / Give them the key, oh set them free.” See the following description of a protest camp: “Hundreds of thousands were converging on Manchester for the protests. There were tents on Piccadilly Gardens, food stalls and soup kitchens were being set up. There were posters and banners demanding that the government must resign, that the banks must be broken, that the corporations that had become more powerful than states be controlled, that capital should be mutually owned. A couple of the big office towers had signs up saying ‘FREE MANCHESTER’. It was a declaration, not a request.” (Burgess 193).

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was all up for grabs. The Zealots had shown the nation how to seize the future by setting fire to the present. Who knew what tomorrow would bring? burgess 21

Nobody knows, but one can speculate about what tomorrow will bring just as Jonathan Trigell and the makers of Attack the Block do, and thus give voice to a critique of social inequality that involves audiences imaginatively and emotionally. Genus and Attack employ conventions of science fiction with obvious differences in style as well as social ‘message’, but both fictions ultimately attest the importance of resistance – not only in the city – where necessary social change is to be effected. Works Cited Primary References

Aaronvitch, Ben. Rivers of London. London: Gollancz, 2011. Attack the Block. Dir. Joe Cornish. uk/France: Studiocanal, uk Film Council, Channel Four, 2011. Film. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. 1997. New York: HarperTorch, 2001. “Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder.” guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media. Web. 6 Oct. 2013. Pratchett, Terry. Dodger. London: Doubleday, 2012. Pritchard, Tim. Street Boys: 7 Kids, 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood. London: HarperElement, 2008. Trigell, Jonathan. Genus. London: Corsair, 2011.

Research Literature

“Attack the Block.” imdb Database. Web. 15 Oct. 2013. Bloom, Clive. Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Briggs, Daniel, ed. The English Riots of 2011: A Summer of Discontent. Sherfield on Loddon: Waterside, 2012. Burgess, Melvin. The Hit. Frome: Chicken House, 2013. Butler, Patrick. “London: An Urban Neo-Victorian Dystopia.” The Guardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 2 Dec. 2011. Web. 25 Sept. 2013. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. “Marxist Theory and Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge up, 2003. 113–124.

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Cuevas, Susanne. “‘Societies Within’: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions.” Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+. Ed. Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Christoph Reinfandt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 383–398. Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Classes. London: Verso, 2011. Korte, Barbara. “Dealing with Deprivation: Figurations of Poverty on the Contemporary British Book Market.” Anglia 130.1 (2012): 75–94. Lammy, David. Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots. London: Guardian, 2011. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Tiffin, Jessica. “Outside/Inside Fantastic London.” English Academy Review 25.5 (2008): 32–41. .

Part 3 Gender and Sexuality

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Chapter 9

‘Lost to the Streets’: Violence, Space and Gender in Urban Crime Fiction Gill Plain Abstract This essay explores the relationship between gender, genre and urban space through an analysis of the strategies of resistance mobilized by crime writer George Pelecanos in his novels Hell to Pay from 2002 and Soul Circus from 2003. Beginning with a brief survey of crime fiction’s long-standing engagement with the city, and the paradigmshifting impact of the television series The Wire, the essay explores Pelecanos’ modernisation of the traditional private eye novel. Through a reimagining of detective agency and a multi-perspectival depiction of the counter-cultural forces at play within the city, he offers a textual reinstatement of young black lives lost to the criminal indifference of American political elites. He also formulates a series of individual strategies of resistance built around the public performance of masculinity; but in so doing, his otherwise radical reinscription of generic form works to reinstate traditional gender binaries and the archetypal fantasy of hard-boiled masculinity. There are, then, tensions in these fictions that expose the cost of ‘resistance’, and which problematize attempts to reimagine agency. In his mapping of Washington dc, Pelecanos explores the ‘resistant’ bodies of an excluded and demonised counterculture; he also, however, reinstates a nostalgic mythos of family that once again works to exclude women from the city.

Keywords Crime – detective – genre – police – George Pelecanos – The Wire – gender – masculinity – community – race – class – counter-culture – nostalgia – urban space – Judith Butler

…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. raymond chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (198)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_012

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…the Petworth [football] club could not attract enough boys in those age groups, the early-to-mid-teen years, to form a squad. Many of these boys had by then become too distracted by other interests, like girls, or necessities, like part-time jobs. Others had already been lost to the streets. george pelecanos, Hell to Pay (45)

Crime fiction has a long history of engagement with the city as a site of conflict between competing cultures of power. It has an equally long and wellestablished history as a space for the negotiation of gender anxieties; and the formation – in the figure of the hard-boiled detective – of a mode of specifically urban hyper-masculinity has made the genre a potent locus of fantasy. From Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco, to Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, to Ed McBain’s Isola – a fictionalized version of New York – twentieth-century crime fiction mapped the city as a space where the delicate balance between order and chaos was precariously maintained, often through the more-or-less heroic agency of white, working-class masculinity. This formative figure was the ‘private eye’, the hard-boiled investigator who brings a personal ethical code to bear on the larger ‘problem’ of the city. Solving a single case usually in conflict both with criminal subculture and legal authority, the ‘hard-boiled’ detective suggested that the individual could make a difference within a corrupt urban environment. The persistence of this fantasy of masculine agency, and its implications for the generic construction of modes of political and social resistance, will be integral to this essay.1 However, my analysis of the relationship between gender, genre and urban space will also draw on crime narrative’s capacity, often and paradoxically demonstrated in conjunction with the triumph of the private eye, to imagine the city as a locus of violence and alienation, a site of endemic criminality where the pursuit of justice is a futile and frequently absurd affair. Traces of this social pessimism can be found across the twentieth century in, for example, the cynicism of Dashiell Hammett’s nameless Continental Op, who first appeared in Black Mask magazine in the 1920s; the brutality of Chester Himes Harlem detective novels (1957–1969); the compromised ethics, dark humour and violence of British television series The Sweeney (1975–1978), and, more recently, the pervasive disillusionment that characterises Paul Attanasio and David Simon’s series Homicide, Life on the Street (1993– 1999). However, the genre’s engagement with the urban environment as a site 1 It is remarkable how difficult it has been for the crime genre to escape the fantasy of individual agency. Contemporary procedural dramas, from csi (2000-) to The Killing (2007–2012), extract the individual from the organization to depict dedicated police professionals, both male and female, almost single-handedly working to achieve justice for the disenfranchised.

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for the negotiation of political struggle reaches its zenith in the groundbreaking tv series The Wire (2002–2008). In this remarkable piece of television that ran for five seasons, the city – Baltimore – is depicted as ‘not just setting and backdrop, but subject and fabric’ (Clandfield 41). Indeed, so important is Baltimore to the development of the narrative that it overwhelms any individual agent to become the series’ central antagonist. The Wire provides, then, a elegant demonstration of how, in crime fiction, the city emerges as a complex ‘character’, an ecosystem in which individual inhabitants struggle to resist the shaping force of institutional power or its counter-cultural other. As this brief outline suggests, crime fiction’s history of urban engagement makes it an effective generic form through which writers might imagine resistance to a range of social problems and institutional injustices. This polemical purpose is integral to the work of George Pelecanos, whose 2002 novel Hell to Pay can be seen as a precursor to the socio-political preoccupations underpinning The Wire.2 Pelecanos will be the focus of this essay; he is a writer with a long-standing interest in mapping the city, and his crime fiction offers a usefully contained illustration of the techniques of urban representation and resistance that are spread across five series of The Wire. However, before I turn to this textual analysis, it is worth briefly exploring the hermeneutic categories that have been deployed to examine The Wire, as its considerable popular success has attracted far greater critical attention than is currently afforded to contemporary crime fictions. Work on The Wire, then, provides a valuable context for understanding the concepts of ‘resistance’ operating within early 21st century crime writing more broadly, and after an initial survey of critical approaches, I will consider the implications of these readings for Pelecanos’ modernisation of the traditional private eye narrative. In the later sections of the essay, however, I will argue that, for all the apparently modernity and radical purpose of this contemporary rewriting, the genre also carries with it a legacy of gender stereotyping that persists against – and threatens to undermine – the best political intentions of the writers who appropriate it. Since its completion in 2008, The Wire has generated considerable critical interest from a variety of theoretical and generic perspectives. One of the first interventions, Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall’s collection of essays, The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television from 2009, was characterised by a frequently Foucauldian address to the urban economies depicted.3 A number of 2 Pelecanos’ sympathy with the type of ‘resistance narrative’ imagined by The Wire is evident in his involvement with the series as writer and producer. 3 Both Alisdair McMillan and Peter Clandfield develop arguments for the fundamental role of social critique in the narrative structure of The Wire. Clandfield argues that the extended

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critics in the volume turned to Discipline and Punish to analyse the disciplinary mechanisms at play in the urban ecosystem. The police, criminal gangs, political cabals and legal systems are seen to operate as self-regulating forces that, irrespective of both good intentions and active corruption, ensure the maintenance of a fragile, largely illusory, equilibrium of law and order. This is, in Foucault’s terms, a “micro-physics of power”, a “perpetual battle” in which power is “exercised rather than possessed”, a dynamic that has a paralysing impact on the social imaginary and individual agency (Foucault 26).4 In such a context, pragmatic projects with active humanitarian benefits that attempt to challenge this urban-institutional order, such as the creation, in season 3, of ‘Hamsterdam’ – a ‘free-zone’ away from housing in which drugs can be bought and sold without police intervention – will inevitably be defeated by cynical self interest and the reassertion of a crudely capitalist status quo. In the words of Alisdair McMillan, the “Baltimore Police Department and the other legal institutions of The Wire are machines in the service not of justice, but of shortterm political interests” (53). Analyses of The Wire have not been confined to the Foucauldian. The series has also been explained as variously constituting a 21st century manifestation of the 19th century social realist novel (Marshall and Potter 10; Klein 177), and as a “superior serial melodrama” (Williams 4).5 Its scope – in terms of character, class and the mapping of the city – is Dickensian; as is its anger at the profound injustice of contemporary American society. While Dickens, non-episodic story arcs characteristic of the series are “particularly well-suited to explore the contexts and nuances of complex urban problems” (2009: 38), while McMillan concludes that The Wire “renounces the idealism of the orthodox procedural, bearing a far closer resemblance to modern social theory. Like orthodox political philosophy as interpreted by Foucault, orthodox police procedurals serve a legitimizing function: with very few exceptions, they equate institutional power with right, and Law with Good. In many respects, this grossly distorts the reality of discipline […] By contrast the essence of The Wire is critique: in each storyline and episode, viewers are confronted with the fact of institutional domination in all its arbitrariness, brutality and secrecy.” (54). 4 Foucault further defines the operation of power as presupposing “a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; […] one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated.” (26–27). 5 See also Fredric Jameson, ‘Realism and Utopia in The Wire’, and Leigh Claire La Berge, ‘Capitalist Realism and Serial Form: The Fifth Season of The Wire’, both in Criticism, Vol. 52, Nos 3–4, Summer/Fall 2010.

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in his 1853 novel Bleak House, makes a scathing attack on what he terms ‘telescopic philanthropy’ (the title of Chapter iv) – a mode of public, imperial intervention that would rather convert the natives of Africa than pay attention to the poverty and squalor of Victorian London – The Wire offers a relentless depiction of the waste of young black lives, destroyed not only by violence, but by the indifference of a political caste that is similarly blind to the persistence of a decaying urban infrastructure. For Linda Williams, however, this canvas carries with it the utopian possibility of melodrama. The “spectacular tussle” in The Wire between profound injustice and the imaginative possibility of restitution, which operates at both “the personal and the institutional level”, allows the series to “picture the political and social totality of what ails contemporary urban America and to imagine what justice could be” (Williams 5). There are other, less-widely acknowledged, influences at play in the drama too. In its social critique, The Wire bears signs of having been shaped by European crime writing. While an American procedural writer such as Ed McBain produces superficially disgruntled tales of his gritty imaginary New York that nonetheless celebrate the individual heroism of a largely idealised police force, the Swedish writing partnership of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö produced between 1965 and 1975 a series of 10 police novels which together constituted a damning indictment of postwar Swedish society.6 Featuring a group of Stockholm detectives hampered by institutional self-interest, they depict a nation in which the ideals of liberal socialism are as ineffectual in practice as the success-story individualism preached by the American dream. Yet another influence is feminism: a few years after the influential work of Sjowäll and Wahlöö, in the early 1980s, American crime fiction in turn became a site of radical critique, as feminist and lesbian writers took the basic structures of the hard-boiled private investigator novel – the exemplary fiction of urban experience with which this discussion began – and adopted it for political ends. Women became private investigators and police officers, they investigated systemic injustice and abuses of power, they exposed the prejudices that underpinned American society. The private eye novel also became a space of ethnic diversity, admitting to the protagonist’s role the formerly marginal figures of black men and women.7 In its embrace of open endings and narrative 6 The first Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel, Roseanna (1965) was revolutionary in its emphasis on the bleak anonymity of contemporary society. For much of the book the case cannot be solved because the victim cannot be identified. 7 Important figures in the emergence of a politically engaged urban crime fiction include Sara Paretsky, whose fiction is rooted in the industries that shape the city of Chicago, and Walter

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uncertainty, its unashamed polemical purpose, its predominantly black cast and its deployment of at least some female agents (most notably, detective Kima Greggs and State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman), The Wire owes a debt to the ground-breaking radical fictions of the 20th century, and this debt has seen it read as a practical demonstration of problems in social theory. Both tv series and recent scholarship on urban inequality, note Chaddha and Wilson, share a concern with understanding the “persistence and durability of concentrated disadvantage, which is reproduced across generations” (164–165). In summarizing these developments, it becomes clear that the crime genre is a significant textual space for the negotiation of the urban, and that The Wire in many respects represents the apotheosis of the relationship between genre and place. However, as this essay will demonstrate, the process of mapping the urban and imagining resistance to the coercive forces that shape it generates counter-discourses that are themselves problematically restrictive. My focus in illustrating this is the work of George Pelecanos, a crime fiction writer who would go on to become a producer on The Wire. In Hell to Pay from 2002, he produces a mapping of the city – in this case Washington dc – that not only represents resistance, but also, in the unexpected vision and creativity of its characters and plot, introduces an element of utopianism into its grim engagement with narrative realism (Jameson 371–372). This novel and its successor Soul Circus, published in 2003, present the same Foucauldian dynamics of power and Dickensian social indictment that made The Wire such an innovative television series, but they also make explicit the problematically gendered consequences of such attempts to imagine urban resistance.8

Mosely, whose la-set Easy Rawlins novels expose the fundamental racial inequalities that shape American culture. 8 It is also worth noting that the tensions depicted in fictions such as The Wire and Hell to Pay have implications for the stability of the detective genre itself. Pelecanos’ social analysis suggests a culture moving away from the ideological consensus that has long underpinned the success of the detective story. As Dennis Porter has demonstrated, the detective’s emergence as a “heroic literary type” is only possible after the establishment of a system of law enforcement capable of commanding respect from a significant proportion of society. Such a consensus emerged in the aftermath of the industrial revolution and saw the outlaw hero of previous centuries gradually replaced by emergent modes of detective heroism that could protect the middle and upper classes’ investment in a stable social order (Porter 150–153). Analysis of the fragmentation of this long-established consensus is beyond the scope of this article, but some consequences of this breakdown will become evident in Pelecanos’ reimagining of the detective figure, the criminal and their contexts.

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Who Pays? Imagining Urban Resistance in Hell to Pay

George Pelecanos has been writing crime fiction set in the working-class neighbourhoods of Washington dc since 1992, when he published his first novel, A Firing Offense. This, and a number of his early works, featured Nick Stefanos, a hard-drinking Greek-American drop-out who acts as one of crime fiction’s more malfunctioning private investigators. In 2001, though, Pelecanos changed direction, producing Right As Rain, the first of a trilogy that would introduce perhaps his most successful detective figure, the African American private investigator Derek Strange. Strange, a former dc policeman is a patient, experienced investigator, proud of having run his own business in the Petworth area of the city for some 25 years. The novel, and those that follow it, represent something of a paradigm shift for the detective figure, in that Strange is not an outsider or a loner, but a middle-aged small businessman at the heart of his community. He coaches football and he belongs – proud of what he has achieved, widely known and respected. Like all detectives, he is not without his problems: the first novel follows the slow death of this mother, while the second tracks his commitment issues. Significantly, he finds it easier to accept responsibility for a whole football team of other people’s children than he does for his lover Janine and her son Lionel. The most important relationship of the trilogy, though, is that between Strange and another former police officer, Terry Quinn. They meet in the first novel when Strange is hired to investigate the shooting, by Quinn, of a black police officer. Although cleared of wrongdoing by the official enquiry, Quinn has left the force. He is troubled and angry, a young white man who believes he is not racist, so cannot understand the resentment and ‘disrespect’ he faces from the black community. The details of the plot are less important than the epiphany that closes the book: Quinn comes to the realisation that he made an assumption of criminality based on skin colour; he pulled the trigger because he saw a black man holding a gun. Although divided by race and generation, Strange and Quinn form a friendship, bonding over a shared love of music and Westerns, and a shared understanding of what it means to have a been a cop.9 And having established his unlikely detecting partnership, in the second novel, Hell to Pay, Pelecanos is free to concentrate on the bigger picture: the endemic violence and the casual destruction of young black lives that goes unnoticed on the streets of America’s capital. All the novels in the trilogy use multifocal third person narration that moves between the detectives, the criminals and more-or-less innocent bystanders who inhabit the city. This narrative technique enables Pelecanos 9 Indeed, by Soul Circus, Quinn has become almost a surrogate son to Strange, who becomes increasingly protective of his emotionally uncontrolled friend.

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to complicate the assumptions of guilt and innocence that might otherwise emerge simplistically from the actions of the perpetrators, and it allows him to demonstrate the environmental factors that create both poverty and criminality. Through these heteroglossic voices, and through direct authorial intervention, Hell to Pay and Soul Circus emerge as very angry books, assaulting the sensibilities of the reader through their direct political engagement and graphic depiction of violence. Hell to Pay opens with the point of view of three disenfranchised young black males (ybms): Garfield Potter, Carlton Little and Charles White. Potter, the group’s alpha male, has been brutalised by physical and emotional neglect at the hands of a junkie mother (318). He can scarcely read, but has learnt that for all the world expects of him, this frankly does not matter. He resists his marginalisation through investment in the counter culture: he makes better money from drugs than he could in the sort of low-level dead-end employment that his utterly inadequate upbringing qualifies him for: He could have used a father, he supposed, someone to throw a football to or sumshit like that. His mother didn’t even have the strength to lift a ball, eighty-eight pounds of no-ass crackhead like she was, at the end. He wasn’t going to cry about that either. Family and all that bullshit, it meant nothing to him, and it didn’t get you anything when you counted the chips up at the end of the day. It was like them books his teachers always tellin’ him to read before they gave up on his ass, back about the fifth grade. He couldn’t hardly read, and still he had a shoe box full of cash money in the closet at his place, clothes, cars, bitches, everything. So what was the point of books, or some piece of paper, said you went to school? (119) Potter and his crew – friends hardly seems an appropriate word when the novel opens with Potter gratuitously shooting White’s dog – are in “the life” (198). They have been “lost to the streets”, consumed by the city.10 They are part of the drug economy that perversely mirrors its legal counterpart, offering employment opportunities from entry level to middle management, and a structure of promotion based on aptitude and examination – or, to use the military metaphor favoured by Pelecanos, through proving yourself on “the front lines” (238). This parallel economy and its procedures gets its most explicit account in Soul Circus, when gang boss Dewayne Durham weighs up the potential of one of his employees: “[…] he had never killed. This here was a test and an opportunity, 10

Another boy, encountered later in the book, is never seen to smile. Strange sees him as “already dead inside at eleven, twelve years old” (235).

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to see if these boys were ready to go to the next level, and to reduce the number of the Yuma Mob by two. […] [I]t would also be good for business” (143). Dewayne, a middle manager in the economy of ‘the life’, understands how business systems work and is shown encouraging his ‘troops’ on the grounds that a “man, however big he believed himself to be, wasn’t nothin’ without his employees” (46). Meanwhile, at the top of this hierarchy, the bosses and their ceos are those who have, like all good capitalists, built empires. In Hell to Pay this figure is Granville Oliver, a man so successful as a drug lord that he has bought himself a degree of legitimacy, funding community projects through the very drugs that threaten to destroy that community: For many of the area’s youths, the Olivers, especially the young and handsome Granville, were now the most respected men in Southeast. The police were the enemy, that was a given, and working men and women were squares. The Olivers had the clothes, the cars, and the women, and the stature of men who had returned from war. They gave money to the community, participated in fund-raisers at local churches, sponsored basketball squads that played police teams, and passed out Christmas presents in December […] They were the heroes, and the folk heroes, of the area. Many kids growing up there didn’t dream of becoming doctors or lawyers or even professional athletes. Their simple ambition was to join the Mob, to be ‘put on’. (238–239) Oliver is no fool: he is a widely read autodidact, versed in a rhetoric of black separatism, which he selectively interprets to justify his actions (242, 248). He is also a young man, a warrior, who knows his Julius Caesar. There are no old soldiers in ‘the life’, no older generation: betrayal is inevitable, death is inevitable (Hell to Pay 116; Soul Circus 52 and 59). This is capitalism as warfare, and competition – business changing hands – operates through the simple strategy of murder. This deadly counter culture has emerged as a force of resistance against an urban infrastructure still fundamentally racist in its denial of opportunity to those born in poverty, and here Pelecanos is quite explicit about the underlying forces that are superficially manifest in racial tension. The most destructive boundary lines in contemporary America are based on money – the basic economic divide between the haves and the have nots. When the detectives visit a middle-class shopping mall, they find its demographic is comfortably multi-ethnic: Colour ceases to matter so much if you have money. It is credit that makes the subject socially legible, turning the invisible human cog in the urban machine into a viable citizen body (Hell to Pay 69). And when Strange’s

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football team, the Petworth Panthers, go to play the suburban Cardinals, the hostility they meet, we are told, “wasn’t a white-black thing. It was a money-no money thing, a way for those who had it to show superiority over those who did not” (166). Culture and counter-culture, then, are locked in the deadly symbiosis of Foucault’s “micro-physics of power”, and their interdependency suggests the impossibility of either side ever triumphing in some glorious utopian social revolution (26). In this systemic framework, can there be any hope of change, or of salvation for a generation of lost boys? Not for the likes of Potter, Garfield and White, it would seem. They are irretrievably lost to the streets. But, in what might be seen as a melodramatic demand for justice, Pelecanos does imagine that there could be hope for the next generation, the boys not yet matured into the hardened affectless employees of ‘the life’. The question is, how can they be saved? What strategies of resistance can the liberal detective, the man who argues for gun control and against the death penalty (Soul Circus 187 and 238), utilise to resist the pull of the life? How can he save, if not the world, at least “a kid or two” (226)? Within the space of the novel, there are two different modes of regenerating the city – the capitalist version that destroys and homogenises ‘in the name of redevelopment and gentrification’ (Hell to Pay 105), and the community version that holistically builds family or pseudo family ties.11 Strange’s dedication to the Petworth Panthers is part of this holistic anti-industrial mythos, a form of care in the community designed to keep ‘the kids away from the bad’ (57). But the fragility of such projects, their status as a band-aid over a gaping wound in the social fabric, becomes evident both in the turning point of the narrative – the murder of eight-year-old Joe Wilder, one of Strange’s football protégées – and in an examination of the lessons that Strange is actually teaching his boys. He is less concerned with teaching them a sport than with teaching them the performance of masculinity (although, arguably, the two cannot easily be divided). Western masculinities, whether working class or middle class, have traditionally been constructed around ideas of control and power. To be male is to embody either physical or mental prowess – ideally, both. It is to be strong, hard, rational or ruthless, and above all to be the opposite of the feminine (Easthope 6).12 Masculinity means not showing 11

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This first mode of regeneration is figured as suffocating and deadly – ‘The closed-mouth kiss of gentrification’ (Soul Circus 213) – and is particularly disturbing to Quinn, who exhibits a nostalgia for the city-as-village that speaks also to the alienation of white workingclass cultures in the age of global capital. Anthony Easthope summarizes his analysis of the ‘masculine myth’ as follows: “Masculinity aims to be one substance all the way through. In order to do this it must control what

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emotion, not doing anything that might lead to a perception of weakness, passivity or vulnerability. Within this framework, however, the construction of hegemonic or dominant masculinities is historically and culturally contingent. For all the Wall Street financier’s power and influence, his masculinity could not be read as hegemonic in the working-class streets of Washington dc. Here, dominant masculinity is encoded in the body, in rituals of self-presentation and the negotiation of space and territory. This is a world dominated by such hyperbolic constructions of the impenetrable bounded male self that even inadvertent eye-contact might be fatal, where young men must learn to shut down all visible appearance of emotion and present a regimented neutrality to the world. Here is Strange watching one of his boys walk home: He watched Lamar move slowly through the courtyard, not too fast, like he was scared, chin level, squared up. Strange thinking, You learned early, Lamar, and well. To know how to walk in a place like this was key, a basic tool for survival. Your body language showed fear, you weren’t nothin’ but prey. Hell to Pay 60

That such an education has its limits is made clear later when we experience Lamar’s point of view: “But it was hard to keep doing right. Hard to have to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, keep up that shell all the time out there, when sometimes all you wanted to do was be young and have fun. Relax” (128). Survival, then, is all about the preservation of the masculine shell – endurance, restraint, control – an almost archaic idea of what masculinity should be, far removed from the idea of the city as a space of possibility and diversity.13

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threatens it both from within and without. Within, femininity and male homosexual desire must be denied; without, women and the feminine must be subordinated and held in place” (166). It is worth noting that the ‘lesson’ of masculinity is not only something that needs to be learnt by the city’s black inhabitants. Terry Quinn struggles – and fails – throughout the series to follow Strange’s code. He reacts to what he perceives as “disrespect”, he makes eye-contact rather than be “shamed”, and he proves, time and again, that there is no greater insult to conventional masculinity than the accusation of femininity (Hell to Pay 98). And, perhaps inevitably, at the end of the final novel he is shot and killed by gang members he had been unable to resist confronting. As Easthope’s theorising suggests, such a hyperbolic performance of masculinity is, ultimately, counterproductive, not least because it makes visible that which culture demands should be an invisible norm. The excess represented by Quinn’s performance also risks being seen as ‘feminine’, as Stefanos notes: “He shows some smarts and less emotion, he’s gonna live longer” (Soul Circus 238).

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With practice, then, the streets can be survived; but this incremental process of resistance is disrupted and complicated by the murder of Joe Wilder, an event that generates a very different ‘masculine’ response. After Wilder’s death, the narrative voice changes: here is the rage against telescopic philanthropy that aligns Pelecanos with Dickens: Because of the numbing consistency of the murder rate, and because lower-class black life held little value in the media’s eyes, the violent deaths of young black men and women in the District of Columbia had not been deemed particularly newsworthy for the past fifteen years. Murders of young blacks rarely made the lead-off in the tv news and were routinely buried inside the Metro section of the Washington Post, the details consisting of a paragraph or two at best, the victims often unidentified, the follow-up nil. Suburban liberals plastered Free Tibet stickers on the bumpers of their cars, seemingly unconcerned that just a few short miles from the White House, American children were enslaved in nightmare neighbourhoods, living amid gunfire and drugs and attending dilapidated public schools. The nation was outraged at high school shootings in white neighbourhoods, but young black men and women were murdered without fanfare in the nation’s capital every single day. (194–195) These paragraphs are part of the fiction, but they cannot be integrated into the narrative: they are rather a form of textual resistance, a brutal insertion of front-line reportage into the fictional text. The self-effacing quality of the novel’s narration – Pelecanos relies heavily on free indirect speech – is here disrupted by the emergence of an implied author. This is a voice previously unheard in the text’s tapestry of voices, addressing a nation and a problem beyond the boundaries of Petworth and the single fictional death being mourned. Yet it is not just this implied authorial voice that gets angry. Strange also undergoes a qualitative transformation: the man whose detective methodology is summed up in the mantra “honey gets the flies” (104), now pursues Wilder’s killers with uncharacteristic brutality. In symbolically rising to the occasion, like Clark Kent transformed into superman, he occupies a mode of masculinity that is more obviously phallic, and yet, like Quinn’s uncontrolled anger, perversely feminine in its loss of control.14 Is, then, the only mode of resistance to meet violence with violence? Strange pulls back from the brink 14

I am indebted to Arthur Flannigan-Saint-Aubin for this metaphor and for the analysis of masculinity it enables (252–255).

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and returns to the promotion of heroic masculine endurance, much like that favoured by the Western heroes he admires, and the book too pulls back from the consequences of its plot developments. We are left with the ambivalent compromise of knowing that Joe Wilder’s killers will be killed, but it will not be Strange who pulls the trigger. A further ambivalence might be noted in the wider implications of Strange’s strategies for resisting ‘the life’. In Hell to Pay boys have to be taught how to survive on the street; but girls, by contrast, have to be taken off the street. What are the implications of this gendered plotting? Following Georg Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, we might think of the modern city as a space that enables complexity in gender relations. The city, says Simmel, is the “seat of cosmopolitanism” (Simmel 181): “metropolitan man [sic] is ‘free’ in a spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hem in the small-town man” (181). As the city grows, “inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections” (180). The atomized condition of the urban is enabling as well as aien-ating, it is the space in Western societies where transgressive subcultures can flourish, and boundaries blur. For women it has the potential to be a space in which conventional binary familial structures are disrupted, and where the heterosexual matrix might lose its grip. But this is not the case in Hell to Pay, which seems to offer not liberation but a new narrative of containment. In attempting to resist the deadly force of the city, Pelecanos’ novels insist on a hyperbolic and reactionary performance of traditional genders, suggesting, perhaps unintentionally, that reclaiming the streets has little to do with making them a space that might be occupied by women. Hell to Pay produces two parallel story arcs that are also a gendered division of labour: while Strange and Quinn work to save boys from the street, the female detective duo of Karen Bagley and Sue Tracy run a business rescuing girls from prostitution. This is the equivalent threat that the city poses to girls and young women: leaving the shelter of ‘home’ for addiction and abuse on the streets. The public presence of women is thus always configured as potentially criminal and subject to the disciplinary force of the sex trade. Those who avoid this fate fare little better, surviving as single mothers, more or less financially dependent on the young men who have fathered their ‘beef babies’ (245).15 While the presence of a female detective duo suggests a degree of equality in 15

Youthful masculinity proves itself both through killing men and through impregnating women, and many of the female characters in the books have fatherless children: Janine, Sandra Wilder, Devra Stokes, Olivia Elliot.

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the project of resisting the destructive force of urban life, the potential represented by the public presence of Karen and Sue is complicated by the suggestion emerging in Hell to Pay that there are, in fact, not two genders but three: male, female and cop. Conventional ‘feminine’ women, like Strange’s lover Janine, are safely domesticated and devoted either to their menfolk or their children. Or they are virginal good daughters, like Aisha, whose father hires Strange to check the credentials of her future husband.16 Sue Tracy, by contrast, does not behave like a woman, she behaves like a cop. She has an active role in the book, and builds a friendship – as well as a sexual relationship – with Quinn through their shared experience of a uniformed subjectivity. Her characteristics – straight talking, calmness, professionalism, and her confession of violent feelings that she nonetheless controls – situate her in a culturally masculine position (159), and she performs this female masculinity with a comfort and ease entirely lacking from Quinn’s failing performance of ‘epic masculinity’ (Halberstam 4). The Wire, in turn provides an analogue for Sue in the form of Kima Greggs. The representation of these two women depends upon a desexualised, and de-gendered, public presence: Sue is straight, Kima is gay, but both are ‘good police’.17

Bodies that Matter: Gender, Resistance and the City

What conclusions can be drawn from these observations? Survival on the streets of 21st century Washington dc would seem to depend upon the performance of hyperbolic masculinities that in turn produce regressive or limiting modes of female subjectivity. While Sue Tracy’s ‘police’ subjectivity might be seen to trouble conventional binary gender structures, she is an exception in a culture where both black and white masculinities depend upon a ‘feminine’ other for self-confirmation. In private, Sue and Quinn are free to enjoy her masculine subjectivity. In public, as the confrontation with the pimp Worldwide 16

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Strange discovers that the prospective husband, Calhoun Tucker, is still a ‘player’, and, confronted by the self-righteous detective, Tucker’s response makes clear the persistence of the age-old gender stereotypes of virgin and whore: women you marry and women you sleep with (226). It should be noted that the rhetoric of the text is unflinching in its abuse and commodification of women. The free indirect discourse of the male characters reveals disturbing levels of violence and disgust, describing women as bitches, animals and possessions to be owned. See for example, Soul Circus 264.

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Wilson makes clear, Sue’s self-assertion will have the necessary corollary of Quinn’s emasculation. Taunting ‘Terry’ Quinn for his size and his feminine name, Wilson has only admiration for Sue’s commanding performance: “You got a lot more man to you than this itty-bitty motherfucker right here” (Hell to Pay 149). Beyond the violent negotiation of hegemonic masculinity, the persistent reinforcement of gender binaries, like Quinn’s fierce loyalty to his neighbourhood, represents a profoundly nostalgic reaction to the atomizing force of the modern city. It is an imagined return to a pre-industrial social formation, an eighteenth-century ideal of coherent, homogeneous (village) community, structured around family and the concrete virtues of artisan production. It is, to return to Simmel, a rejection of money as the motor and shaping force of social organisation. However, while it can be argued that Pelecanos’ representation of gender roles is limiting and problematic, Hell to Pay and Soul Circus equally demand to be read as vital resistance narratives. The anger that I discussed earlier, combined with the persistent trope of battle that permeates the depiction of urban subcultures, suggest that we might read these novels not as crime fiction, but as narratives of war – and, as such, they invite us to think about the lives of ybms through the lens of post-9/11 cultural theory. Judith Butler, in Precarious Life from 2004 and its 2009 sequel Frames of War, asks us to consider what constitutes a “grievable” body. Butler’s concern is with American foreign policy: the prosecution of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the racism and Islamophobia that determines which bodies matter, and which are so irretrievably other that they do not qualify as ‘life’: “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames”, she argues, “then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (Butler, Frames 1). It is not an enormous conceptual leap to translate Butler’s concept of the grievable body from Abu Ghraib to Washington dc, nor to understand the unmourned life as that of a generation of ybms whose “entitlements to persistence and flourishing” (2) are fundamentally undermined by a social policy that prioritizes the right to bear arms over the right of the child to education and healthcare. Life, argues Butler, “requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life” (14). Derek Strange, reading of another dead black youth, muses: Two sentences […] that’s all a certain kind of kid in this town’s gonna get to sum up his life. There would be more deaths, most likely retribution kills, related to this one. Later, the murder gun might turn up somewhere

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down the food chain. […] Whatever happened, this would be the last the general public would hear about this young man, a passing mention to be filed away in a newspaper morgue, one brief paragraph without even a name attached to prove that he had existed. Another unidentified ybm, dead on the other side of the Anacostia River. pelecanos, Soul Circus 10

The death of a child or woman still generates a response (177) – they are more precious commodities, even if not subjects in their own right – but the warriors of the drugs war have dropped below the threshold of social legibility. Hell to Pay gives voices to these men, however unwelcome their speech, and it grieves, loudly and violently, for their victims: the black children barely a rung above their murderers in contemporary America’s hierarchy of cultural value. Pelecanos’s novels represent, then, a powerful indictment of the vested interests that distort urban space and destroy the lives of those with little choice but to live there (350–351). And within these novels we might identify two distinct modes of resistance. At a macro level, Pelecanos depicts a countercultural force that, while deadly and destructive, nonetheless constitutes an organised, cohere ‘ecosystem’ – an institution of power that cannot be subjugated by the discourses of law and order. At the micro level, though, the book in turn encodes resistance: through the hyperbolic performance of gender, an attempt is made to resist the logic of capitalism and reinstate an earlier mythos of family and community, and in the process render legible – and grievable – the bodies of ybms. This is genre fiction at its most politically powerful, and the books are, in the best sense, Dickensian. Sadly, they are also in the worst sense Dickensian – in that their radical, powerful and wholly justified anger is complemented by an understanding of gender that effaces women from the public sphere and strangely echoes the separate spheres ideology of the Victorian realist novel. Works Cited Primary References

Pelecanos, George. A Firing Offense. 1992. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997. Pelecanos, George. Right as Rain. London: Orion, 2001. Pelecanos, George. Hell to Pay. London: Orion, 2002. Pelecanos, George. Soul Circus. London: Orion, 2003.

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Brod, Harry, and Michael Kaufman, eds. Theorizing Masculinities. London: Sage, 1994. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Chaddha, Anmol, and William Julius Wilson. “‘Way down in the Hole’: Systemic Urban Inequality and The Wire”. Critical Inquiry 38.1 (2011): 164–188. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” Pearls Are A Nuisance. 1950. London: Penguin, 1964. 181–199. Clandfield, Peter. “‘We ain’t got no yard’: Crime, Development and Urban Environment.” The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 37–49. Easthope, Anthony. What A Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1990. Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur. “The Male Body and Literary Metaphors for Masculinity.” Theorizing Masculinities. Ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. London: Sage 1994. 239–258. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. Frisby, David, and Mike Featherstone, eds. Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, 1997. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke up, 1998. Jameson, Fredric. “Realism and Utopia in The Wire.” Criticism 52.3–4 (2010): 359–372. Klein, Amanda Ann. “‘The Dickensian Aspect’: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text.” The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 177–189. McMillan, Alisdair. “Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural.” The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. Ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 50–63. Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale up, 1981. Potter, Tiffany, and C.W. Marshall, eds. The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. New York: Continuum, 2009. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” 1903. Simmel on Culture. Ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1997. 174–185. Williams, Linda. On The Wire. Durham: Duke up, 2014.

Chapter 10

The Urban Residential Balcony as Interstitial Site Sabine H. Smith Abstract This chapter explores the role of the urban residential balcony as a physical, mental, and social construct and as an interstitial site at the periphery of distinct realms of lived experience, e.g. the private interior and the public exterior. By examining textual representations of the urban residential balcony from four cultures, the author traces culture-specific, culture-general, and transcultural practices and perspectives at this interstitial site. The analyses reveal thematic strands that intertwine and generate ‘thick’ descriptions as qualitative evidence for discernible patterns and (at least tentative) conclusions. Peruvian accounts serve as a spring board for a culture-specific discussion of the balconies of Lima and correlational cultural practices that resist and subvert gender role expectations for Lima’s women in the 19th century. In an effort of providing corroborating evidence on the transcultural significance of the balcony in literary history, the chapter discusses the locus of the balcony in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its us American adaptation in the musical West Side Story. Both texts problematize the violent culture beyond the balcony and present the balcony as the lovers’ physical retreat and temporary refuge. In reviewing popular culture accounts on the role of balconies in Germany, the author contextualizes the analysis of the German 2005 feature film Sommer vorm Balkon. The film positions an urban residential balcony in Berlin as a central site and anchor of the plot allowing for both culture-specific and culture-general conclusions that reconnect to discernible patterns unveiled in all texts.

Keywords balcony – interstitial site – women – culture – ambivalence – discourse – urban – resistance – intercultural – transcultural – intra-cultural – gender – film – narratives

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Introduction: The Urban Residential Balcony as Cultural Product

The growing body of scholarship on spatial practices in urban systems invites critical perspectives that examine the extent to which attention has been

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d­ evoted to the topic of resistance to cultural practices prevalent in the city. Henri Lefebvre’s notion of production de l’espace, ‘production of space’, as a dynamic process and as an expression of dissent and affirmation undergirds the critique of extant cultural spaces as sites at which multiple practices and perspectives intersect (cf. Lefebvre). Drawing on Lefebvre, Stuart Elden (110) offers a reading of space as a conceptual triad, as perceived, conceived, and lived, and as a physical, mental, and social construct that accommodates interpretations of space as both real and imagined. Accordingly, the critical analysis of space as a cultural site requires the exploration of spatial practices over time and representations of space as sites invested with symbolism and meaning (110–111). Questions of power and privilege enter into a discussion of space since access to and use of space is regulated by cultural practices and perspectives that manifest themselves in adaptive and resistant attitudes and behaviors. It is within this context that I position my contribution on textual representations of the urban residential balcony. As argued elsewhere (Smith and Bley; Ganeva), the urban residential balcony is a cultural product with correlational cultural practices and perspectives which can be examined over time and space and in culture-specific and culture-general terms. In culture-general terms, the urban residential balcony is situated at the periphery of two distinct experiential spaces (the residential interior and the public exterior) and thus forms an interstitial site. According to sociolinguists Michael Byram and Claire Kramsch, interstitial sites or “third” spaces invite (and can accommodate) alternative practices and perspectives because all occupants find themselves to varying degrees off-center from the original or familiar culture. At the interstices of two (or more) cultures, interactants may engage in the dynamic renegotiation of values, behaviors, roles, and identities. In comparison with perspectives held by members in the core or original cultures, these newly negotiated behaviors and perspectives may be variously perceived as affirming, innovative, alternative, resistant, dissenting, or subversive. To be sure, the interstitial site may become, over time, in itself a space of distinct cultural practices and perspectives, but its occupants as well as interactants beyond the interstice may exhibit ambivalence as they navigate competing allegiances to alternative and established cultures. In proposing that the urban residential balcony as a physical, mental, and social product is such an interstitial site, I view it as located at the intersection of cultural conventions that govern distinct and different cultural spaces. Occupants of the urban residential balcony demonstrate hence correlational practices and perspectives that reflect the dynamic processes of renegotiating roles and identities. In what follows, I will seek to examine the extent to which the site of the urban residential balcony, represented in select historical and

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literary accounts from four distinct cultures, affords women, in particular, a space of resistance. In exploring representations of urban residential balconies in Peruvian, English, us American, and German texts, this chapter will seek to verify the extent to which culture-specific narratives on the balconies offer us a glimpse into the cultures themselves, and an opportunity of more deeply understanding intra-cultural and intercultural differences. I intend to show that, at the intersections of diverse textual representations of the role of the balcony, thick descriptions of cultural practices and perspectives emerge. 2

Representations of the Urban Residential Balcony in Peruvian, English, us American and German Texts

Yolanda Fernández Muñoz offers a transcultural history of the balcony in which she chronicles its origins and subsequent geographic diffusion to the Arab world, the Spanish empire, and ultimately the New World. To be sure, the balcony (or its variations, e.g. the loggia, porch, gallery) has evolved in design and purpose over time and space. Balcony functions have differed also in urban and rural settings and according to private-residential or public-ceremonial exigencies, and generally, as cultural mandates have guided their production and utilization. Culture-specific practices, customs and traditions manifest themselves, for example, in architectural styles, laws that regulate the use of space, or in behaviors related to social class and gender. Both Fernández Muñoz and James Higgins comment on the history of Lima’s balconies. According to Fernandez, Lima was known since its early beginnings in the 16th century not only as the “City of Kings” but also as the city of the balconies (Fernández Muñoz 920). Higgins connects Lima’s cultural and literary history with the city’s balconies to point up culture-specific race, class, and gender issues. He references urban policies intended to physically separate upper-class residents on the balconies from lower-class and indigenous street people (28). Charles Walker discusses the balconies of Lima as a social space expressive of power structures by drawing on French critical theorist Michel Foucault. Walker views regulatory discourse on Lima’s balconies in connection with a changing urban social order (55), buttressing Higgins’ observations. According to Walker, however, regulations for Lima’s residences including its balconies were the result not only of efforts to preserve visible distinctions between the lower and upper classes (77), but also to uphold the citizens’ morality (71). Women were granted limited visual and aural access to the street via the balcony, but the semi-enclosed structure protected (and also barred) them from direct contact

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with people and especially men at the lower level – in the literal and figurative sense of the term. Walker concludes that city ordinances, cultural practices and social conventions translated into regulatory discourse on the social and moral propriety of the city’s citizens. Several 19th-century testimonies from Peruvian culture corroborate Walker’s conclusion, yet also describe cultural practices that resisted the official regulatory discourses guiding and policing the use of Lima’s balconies. Limeño historian José Galvez Barrenechea (1885–1957) is credited with having described Lima’s residential balconies as “the site for relaxation, lookout for love affairs, wellspring of gossip and expression of favors” (qtd. in Reyna 2). While Galvez Barrenechea’s comment merely implies behaviors considered improper for women of social status, Ricardo Palma and William Stevenson, contemporaries of Galvez Barrenechea and chroniclers of Peruvian culture, recount specific events in which the balconies of Lima became the sites of illicit romantic adventures (qtd. in “Ficciones” 1–2). Additionally, Stevenson describes a Limeña on a residential balcony and the voyeuristic pleasures enjoyed by both the woman and the men on ground. He concludes that the woman was fully aware of being watched and rejoiced with the attention given to her (2). Stevenson’s observations are complemented by French-Peruvian social activist Flora Tristán when she describes the Limeñas in the 1830s: “Everything about them is, in fact, seductive. […] one can easily see that they must have a set of ideas quite different from those of their European sisters who from childhood are slaves to laws, values, custom, prejudices, styles, and everything else” (Tristán 211–13). According to Tristán, Lima’s women are at liberty to engage in illicit behaviors because they are outwardly disguised (they wear long dresses and veils in public). Arguably, the residential balcony might be viewed in a similar manner – as a space in which women, according to Galvez, Palma, and Stevenson, are at once hidden and at liberty to explore alternative behaviors that resist moral conventions and accepted cultural practices. If textual representations of the balconies of Lima may serve as an entry point to examine the extent to which they form interstitial sites with room for resistance to culture-specific rules and practices, the question arises if the balcony serves as such a locus in other cultures, too. In considering the role of the balcony in transcultural history, the Veronese balcony of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet comes to mind as a prominent example. It also connects with the theme of women’s resistance to cultural conventions of propriety as discussed above. Juliet’s balcony is perhaps mostly known as a site and symbol of love that refutes regulatory powers. The young protagonists’ love deepens on the balcony – despite their families’ deadly feud and extant social rules for women of Juliet’s status. In the play, the families’ entrenched hatred prohibits friendly

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relations between the Montagues and the Capulets in general, even among men. When love-struck Romeo forges access to Juliet by ascending to the balcony, he does so in defiance of the culture’s social mores. Equally, Juliet allows Romeo entry to the private quarters by rejecting societal norms of propriety. Shakespeare’s balcony is both physically and metaphorically at the periphery of the violent and limiting realities on the ground and in-doors, and it grants the couple a temporary haven and fleeting moments of blissful intimacy. In its space, the lovers withdraw from expected behaviors to consummate an alternative relationship that is, sadly, also doomed. Not surprisingly, the ill-fated love story has been widely adapted since its Shakespearean version in the early 16th century (Levenson 95–96). Notable transcultural adaptations are set, for example, in South Africa during the Apartheid regime (Quince 121–25) and in central Europe during the Cold War era (Howard 297). Arguably, such transcultural adaptations connect the play’s underlying eternal and universal themes with culture-specific issues – while taking liberty to varying degrees with the plot and even the ending of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Within the cultural context of the United States, the lovers’ narrative was adapted in West Side Story to world-wide fame, initially in the 1957 Broadway musical (music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) and subsequently in the 1961 film version directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (Sanders 75; Hutchins). In West Side Story, Shakespeare’s families morph into two rival youth gangs in New York City’s urban jungle. Juliet’s balcony and the orchard surrounding the Capulet’s house are replaced by the landing of the fire escape staircase outside Maria’s apartment building and the dimly lit streets in a depressed nyc neighborhood. In both the Shakespeare play and its us American musical adaptation, the balcony and the fire escape landing afford the lovers a space for secret amorous encounters, a temporary reprieve from the murderous environment, and form thus sites of resistance to and temporary suspension from established rules, including those of social morality and sexual propriety. Further, West Side Story thematizes intercultural struggles of race and ethnicity in the plot that pits European-Americans against Puerto Ricans in the street gangs of the Jets and the Sharks. As indicated above, West Side Story as a transcultural and transnational adaptation of Romeo and Juliet represents merely one among many examples of modern-day renditions of the play, but it also significantly widens the Shakespearean conflict beyond social feuds and sexual-social mores to address issues of race relations. Additionally, the Shakespearean balcony, both in its original and in its us American adaptation, functions as an interstitial site in similar ways to the Peruvian accounts. This may serve as corroborating evidence that similar cultural practices and perspectives converge around the site of the urban residential balcony

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in different cultures. Further, it may support the argument that culture-specific explorations of the balcony form both an entry point and springboard in the effort of understanding the role of this interstitial site, therewith justifying its transcultural analysis. In pursuit of examining diverse textual representations of the urban residential balcony as an interstitial space, an additional culture-specific perspective may merit our attention. Jürgen Winkler recounts the history of German urban residential balconies with examples from the city of Bremerhaven. In contrast to the roles played by balconies in Peruvian and Shakespearean texts, German urban residential balconies were, according to Winkler, initially a strictly utilitarian space. In the late 1800s, German balconies were typically located in the back of multi-story buildings, often equipped with the flat’s outhouse. At the time, outhouses were removed from living quarters and only accessible via the balcony, intentionally relegating correlating practices (and odors) to the periphery of the residence. When in-door plumbing became more prevalent in the early 20th century, outhouses were disconnected from balconies, but balconies still served domestic purposes, such as drying laundry. According to Winkler, the balcony’s function as an ‘extra’ living room and private site of relaxation and leisure-time activities evolved with urban architectural styles after World War ii. During the economic miracle years of the 1950s, balconies in newly built apartment buildings became a source of pride and a symbol of emergent prosperity for the (not only economically) upwardly mobile. Balconies offered additional living space and a ‘get-away’ when budget constraints or personal circumstances prohibited vacation travel. Arguably, Winkler’s account of the urban residential balcony in Germany offers a commentary on evolving culture-specific practices at this interstitial site. Further, it seems to suggest underlying cultural perspectives that value adaptation and innovation with respect to life in the urban environment. It is notable that German popular media tout to this day the merits entailed in the creative use of the balcony. The well-known travel guidebook series Marco-Polo includes the volume Komm mit … nach Balkonien (‘Come with me … to Balkonien’ (Müller-Ullrich)), evidently as a resource for those who may have much to learn about a ‘staycation’. Significantly, the guidebook maps Germany according to sun hours per day and proximity of home improvement stores, addressing humorously stereotypical class and gender role expectations and behaviors. Resisting notions that a home-stay is the default recourse for the less sophisticated, Berlin designer Michael Hilgers promotes high-end spaceefficient and environmentally friendly balcony gadgets for the status and climate-change conscious consumer (Einfach Genial). The popular women’s magazine Brigitte features in its online edition a section dedicated exclusively

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to topics around the balcony and yard. Among the articles is the photo-essay “Balkonien: Traumurlaub auf 4 Quadratmetern” (‘Balkonien: Dream Vacation on 4 Square Meters’) an illustrated commentary on how the creative woman maximizes the benefits of her balcony as a retreat from everyday life. The euphemistic name Balkonien is the tongue-in-cheek name of the summer vacation destination for those who do not or cannot afford to travel. Reminiscent of country names that sun-adoring Germans visit, e.g. Italien, Spanien (Italy, Spain), Balkonien is also a well-established cultural site, governed by federal laws, city ordinances and cultural conventions that regulate its use (Müller-Ulrich 98). In one of the Brigitte sections referenced above, Daniela Barth offers her female readership legal advice, urging women to abide by laws and social mores and to abstain, for example, from sexual intercourse on the balcony or nude sunbathing in front of minors (Barth). Legal advice for life at the residential periphery is also communicated by Deutsche Telekom, which alerts readers to recent court decisions (“Mietrecht”). Evidently, rule- and lawdefying residents and their practices have generated such regulatory discourse in German culture, suggesting that both culture-affirming and culture-resisting perspectives converge at the interstitial site of the German residential urban balcony. A 2009 survey documents further the extent to which the urban residential balcony is of widespread importance to Germans from all walks of life (“Draußen”). Among 900 respondents, 83.7% report regular use of the balcony during the summer months as a Freiluftzimmer or open-air room. 44% of the surveyed appreciate the balcony for sun bathing, and 41% of the respondents engage in activities involving eating, drinking, and partying including smoking. Perhaps predictably, then, the balcony in its mass use by Germans, may elicit in some occupants attitudes and behaviors that push the boundaries of established social conventions and necessitate regulatory discourse to control practices. In a recent contribution, German blogger Petra Bauer corroborates the claim that the German urban residential balcony is an important physical, mental, and social site at the periphery of established social conventions. Bauer describes effusively her appreciation of the balcony. She sees its sentimental value derived from a Vogelnestgefühl, a ‘bird’s nest experience’: I look at the world from up above, am in the open, and everything even sounds very differently from the balcony …. Here I grew the first peppers in an old banana box, gazed at the tips of the birches. And when it got really warm, we dragged our mattress onto the balcony and slept open-air. Unphazed by the fact that next-door neighbors could look directly into our love nest. bauer, trans. shs

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Bauer’s almost nostalgic description connects the urban space with nature and mentions new and alternative behaviors that took place, quite naturally, on the balcony. Her comment on the love nest alludes to romantic encounters on the balcony, and she asserts that she was undisturbed by potential voyeurs during these moments of intimacy. In sharing sentiments of freedom and independence connected with the balcony, she seems to also refute conventions of propriety and social mores – not unlike the women did in the textual representations discussed above. While the German popular culture sources referenced here may not evidence generalizable perspectives, they help elucidate thematic strands in recent German texts about the cultural product of the balcony in contemporary German culture. The recurring themes include both social conventions and rule-resistant practices enacted by residents on the balcony, and they address issues related to class and gender role expectations. A discussion of Sommer vorm Balkon from 2005 by German director Andreas Dresen seems appropriate in this context since this feature-length film foregrounds the role of the balcony – not only in the film’s title. The film makes established cultural practices and perspectives in connection with the balcony as a physical, mental, and social construct both visible and calls them into question. While similarities with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seem merely distant in Dresen’s film, I argue that the film references the play in an ironically inverted balcony scene. As argued above, Dresen’s film, as a tangible German cultural product, offers via its cinematography and plot a glimpse into specifically German cultural practices and perspectives (Smith and Bley 151). As characteristic of Dresen’s films and German cinema in the vein of neorealism, Sommer vorm Balkon provides insights into the lives of fairly ordinary people living in present-day Berlin. The analysis traces the film’s narrative and its representation of the urban residential balcony as a physical, mental, and social construct and interstitial site in connection with the characters’ uses of the balcony. The title Sommer vorm Balkon (literally translating into “summer in front of the balcony”), is indicative of the film’s trajectory of calling established cultural practices into question and making alternative perspectives visible. In German, the expression auf dem Balkon ‘on the balcony’ is a common phrase. With the changed preposition, the focus is shifted – from summer happening on the balcony to summer taking place in front of the balcony. In using the alternative preposition, the title both departs from and reminds German readers of the conventional phrase. The unconventional usage reflects appropriately the implied directional perspective, namely a focus on both the balcony and the urban space of the Berlin neighborhood in front of the balcony. Significantly, this dynamic reference is entirely lost in the official English-language title of the film Summer in Berlin. Arguably, an English-speaking audience

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might not understand the cultural implications of the prepositional choice to the extent that a German speaker would. To a speaker familiar with German culture, the conventional expression of summer on the balcony conjures up widely shared cultural practices around the summer use of the balcony, enjoyed especially by members of the lower middle class. As discussed above, the balcony as after-work refuge and site of merely imagined get-aways connotes German occupants as stereotypically petit bourgeois, mostly sedentary, and even provincial. The unconventional usage points to the much more dynamic, evolving, and transitional culture in Germany’s capital with a youthful population and changing demographics. The title’s simultaneous allusion to and detraction from conventional usage and cultural practices around the balcony directs viewer expectations with respect to the film in an intentionally ambiguous and ambivalent manner. I argue that the title is reflective of the entire film’s deliberate stance of addressing and deflecting established cultural practices and perspectives. The characters engage in behaviors that demonstrate, at times, the ironic inversion of and resistance to such conventions, and they exhibit, at other times, behaviors that indicate buy-in to traditional values such as class and gender role expectations. As such, the urban residential balcony in Sommer vorm Balkon is both physically and metaphorically an interstitial site at which competing and conflicting practices and behaviors intersect and accommodate (at least temporarily) the dynamic renegotiation of the characters’ roles and identities. Sommer vorm Balkon has been credited as catapulting filmmaker Dresen to the status of auteur cinematographer (Ganeva 1). The film has been seen in the tradition of German “street films” as Dresen casts the balcony not only as a prominent film site but also as an evolving locale, elevating it to character status in the film (Ganeva 5). Acknowledging the particular role of the balcony and other peripheral sites in Sommer vorm Balkon, Mila Ganeva discusses convincingly the interstitial experiences and threshold perspectives, “blurring the sharp distinction between interiors and exteriors, observers and participants, losers and winners” (6). Svenja Titze observes that the balcony is the refuge for the specifically female relationship (76), which is thrown into crisis because of conventions that mandate gender role specific behaviors. In a comprehensive analysis of the film’s visual and musical manipulative strategies, the film’s ending (with its absence of music and montage) suggests, in Titze’s view, that the female protagonists, Kathrin and Nike, have ultimately overcome these conventions (79). The women have risen above – metaphorically speaking – what is expected of women on the ground and in front of the balcony. As will be shown below, I view the ending in more ambivalent terms than Titze does,

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paying particular attention to the film’s final shots in which balcony and street scenes, not the protagonists, conclude the film. The analyses by Bondebjerg, Ganeva, and Titze buttress the argument I seek to make here. In what follows, I analyze key scenes in Sommer vorm Balkon to propose that the balcony in Dresen’s film serves (at least temporarily) as a refuge, site of resistance, and space of both affirming and dissenting practices and perspectives. Not unlike Balkonien, or the Shakespearean balcony, or the balconies of Lima in the 19th century, Dresen’s balcony, too, serves its occupants as a space where they go when they cannot (afford to) go somewhere else, and where wishful thinking wrestles with the sober realities of day-today life for sometimes only momentary relief. Dresen’s balcony forms also an interstitial site that conjoins distinct realms of experiences as a physical and figurative locus. At the periphery of established physical, mental, and social conventions, it is, as has been argued above, in-between the public exterior and the private interior realm, and, I propose, in-between contemporary Germans’ collective and individual experiences of lower class life in the early 2000s. As such, the balcony site itself contributes to the film’s narrative of ambiguity and ambivalence. While Ganeva sees Sommer vorm Balkon as a film that “refrains from any overt political commentaries” (14), I view the protagonists’ struggles with social conventions as connecting the personal with the political – in a similar way that a feminist reading of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, or the Peruvian accounts may ascertain the characters’ struggles within patriarchal society. In Dresen’s film, the protagonists’ struggles are generated by individual and collectively shared ambivalences with respect to culture-specific practices and perspectives examined above. The site of the balcony forms itself such an ambivalently constructed space as its occupants variously acknowledge and even affirm correlational cultural conventions but call them also into question. As the characters evolve in the course of the film’s narrative, they adapt to yet also resist class and gender role expectations, offering a personal and political commentary on culture-specific and culture-general issues. Multiple scenes on Nike’s balcony anchor the film’s narrative and its forward-spiraling structure: despite a progressive plot development in a conventional advancement toward a climax and dénouement, the film’s narrative of the women’s lives sets out, re-frames, and ends up with the two friends on the balcony – ambivalently indicating the circulatory repetition of life experiences while acknowledging the changes that take place in the interim. Arguably, the interspersed and loosely connected scenes on the balcony mark moments in which the women use the balcony as a ‘safe’ space as they reflect on experiences and navigate traditional and alternative gender role expectations.

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In the first balcony scene, Nike’s balcony is presented as a cozy hiding place. Perched high above the street level, the women find refuge from the day’s events by indulging themselves in girlfriend talk, dinner and drinks, and candlelight. Kathrin comments on how nice it is to be “so schön drüber” (“so nicely above”) which denotes literally and figuratively a position of being physically suspended or figuratively aloof in the sense of having overcome – and as opposed to being ‘stuck’ (on) or connected to whatever is beneath. As the plot develops, it will become clear that Kathrin’s dreamily uttered statement also connotes wishful thinking in contrast with the realities on the ground. In identifying a perspective of distance and separation, it indicates the direction of the women’s visual gaze and frame of reference, namely with what is going on below and in front of the balcony. Much of their attention is focused on men, and in the film’s first balcony scenes, Kathrin and Nike play phone pranks on a couple of men who are physically and metaphorically speaking beneath them. From their hidden look-out post, the women observe, for example, the nerdy-looking pharmacist across the street, and Nike’s flirtatious phone call befuddles the youthful bachelor. As a harmless joke, the women’s enjoyment derives evidently from being in control over someone who is, by distance in space and social class, beyond their direct reach. The balcony offers the safety to be a bit naughty – without suffering any consequences that adults on the street-level would have to face. The balcony scene discussed above serves also to position Nike in contrast to Kathrin: The Ossi Nike models boldness, spontaneity, and fun for and in comparison with the shy, insecure, and depressed Wessi Kathrin, thus inverting further the conventional stereotypes for members of the German subcultures of the former East (the Ossis) and the West (the Wessis). During one of the subsequent nights, Kathrin replicates Nike’s phone prank, evidently emboldened by the self-confident Nike. With her senses dimmed by wine and candlelight, Kathrin drunk-dials her ex-husband and leaves a cynical voicemail disguised as a birthday wish. Sheepishly proud of her brazen act, Kathrin seems empowered by Nike’s example and by the ambience on the balcony as a social space at the periphery of cultural norms. In both phone pranks, the women are presented as taking liberties with social conventions and normative behaviors. The space of the balcony becomes the site at which heterosexual relationships are acknowledged in their importance and playfully called into question as to the weight they carry in the women’s minds. Nowhere in the film is this ambivalent stance as evident as in the humorous balcony scenes with Nike and her lover Ronald. As their relationship changes (progressing swiftly from casual sex to Ronald’s moving in with Nike), we see the balcony space transformed into a utilitarian site: his and her laundry is

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hung out to dry, and Ronald shows Nike how to grow tomatoes in a planter box. On the one hand, the balcony becomes the site where conventional values and petit bourgeois notions of domestic bliss are affirmed, on the other hand, it becomes the realm of wishful thinking: that the relationship may last and afford both of them the tomato harvest for a shared meal. The fact that both labor to domesticate their relationship veils only thinly, however, that the ‘rolling stone’ and womanizer continues to struggle with his role in the relationship. Between pompous posturing and pathetic epitaphs, Ronald personifies a rather bumbling Romeo. Nike tolerates his antics, evidently working toward and wishing for a committed relationship. Nike’s balcony, which has all the fixings of a love nest, becomes also the site of ironic inversions distantly referencing the Shakespeare play: instead of a site for passionate embraces, Nike’s balcony is, initially, the site for ‘bffs,’ and then a domesticated utilitarian space. When Ronald joins Nike for night chats on the balcony, the lovers sit across the table from one another, replicating the spatial arrangement the two women had, yet embodying physical and emotional distance. While Ronald has taken Kathrin’s place, Kathrin is still present in conversation as Nike shares memories of the girlfriends’ times. Formerly the site of open and lighthearted exchanges between Nike and Kathrin, the balcony is now the space where Ronald and Nike steer the conversation painstakingly through intimate details. Yet, it is not their own love relationship which is the topic, but the intimacies they share with others. Arguably, the balcony scenes with Nike and Ronald amount to ironic inversions of Shakespeare’s temporary idyll, resisting the notion of the safe haven. The film’s climactic comedic moment takes place on Nike’s balcony, as well. Despite earlier protestations, and reassured by Nike’s encouragement not to lie, Ronald discloses that he has multiple women and children. Visually irate yet in control, Nike steps inside her apartment and locks Ronald out on the balcony. In effect, she imprisons him in the space that in the Shakespearean original serves as a refuge. Leaving the curtain open wide enough so he can see her disrobe, Nike taunts Ronald visually with the missed opportunity of warmth and intimacy. Ronald is at first incredulous, then outraged, and finally demanding that she open the balcony door to let him in. Raising his voice, possibly to draw attention from the neighbors, he berates her sense of social propriety, implying that she might rethink her action in view of what the neighbors might think. Nike, however, goes to sleep, evidently unphazed by both Ronald’s tirades and any neighbor’s concern. In ironic reference to Romeo’s ascent to Juliet’s balcony, Ronald threatens to climb down and that it will be her fault if he falls to his death. Since Nike remains unmoved by his threats, he ultimately whimpers pleadingly Bitte, mach uff – det ist doch kalt hier draußen ‘Please

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open up – it’s cold out here.’ In the morning, Nike opens the balcony door, and audible bird song accompanies Ronald’s waking up, rounding out the ironically inverted references to Shakespeare’s play. The film’s sequence, in its allusions to the Shakespearean balcony scene, portrays Ronald as an emasculated Romeo and pathetically helpless, jilted lover. Nike, on the other hand, assumes (at least temporarily) agency and control as she rejects Ronald and refutes his expectations for her as nurturing and forgiving. The scene is the comedic climax of the film and the apex of Nike’s self-affirmation: the relationship with Ronald unravels fast from here. As a result of the balcony scene, Nike appears ‘done’ with him even before she finally hands him his things, realizing that she is better off without him. While Shakespeare’s tragedy and Dresen’s film differ significantly from each another, some traits of the Shakespearean balcony scene are recognizable in the German feature. As a transcultural and ironic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Sommer vorm Balkon offers, I submit, a modern-day version that reflects the specific cultural context of its German characters. Specifically, I see recognizable parallels between the play and the film in the following details: Ronald, the quasi-Romeo, inserts himself in the picture and onto the balcony in similar ways as Shakespeare’s protagonist represents the intrusive and disruptive force that advances the plot. The balconies in both the Shakespearean tragedy and Dresen’s film serve as interstitial sites that offer a refuge from the outside world. On the balconies, the protagonists take liberties with established conventions, yet they also acknowledge their cultures’ class and gender role expectations and the extent to which they have been socialized. Both Shakespeare’s feuding families and, much less spectacularly, Dresen’s characters overcome their conflicts to move on with their lives. 3

Conclusion: The Urban Residential Balcony of Sommer vorm Balkon as Transcultural Adaptation

To be sure, the plot and characters depicted in Dresen’s film also differ in comparison with Shakespeare’s tragedy, but can be read as juxtapositions that reference the original implicitly. The ill-fated love relationship between Romeo and Juliet finds its counterpart in the short-lived romance between Nike and Ronald. While Shakespeare’s lovers come to their tragic deaths, Dresen’s lovers overcome the conflicts to resume their lives (Nike and Kathrin return to their balcony chats, and Ronald moves on to the next (or former) girlfriend). The extensive yet close-knit feudal family structures in Romeo and Juliet are replaced in Sommer vorm Balkon with rather loosely woven networks of s­ upport

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maintained by modern-day impoverished singles (Nike doesn’t have a family at all and takes care of geriatrics and her friends instead. Kathrin’s family is fragmented into her former husband, her mother in Freiburg, and her son Max who has become self-sufficient at an early age. Ronald, having fathered three children with different lovers, seems to drop in and out of his women’s lives rather unannounced and at his own discretion). The romantic ideal set forth in Romeo and Juliet finds its negative mirror image in the fairly credible realities presented as the characters’ lives. In reading Sommer vorm Balkon through the lens of a culture-specific and transcultural analysis, one can appreciate the film’s merits in developing a deeper understanding of German culture on the one hand and in laying open emergent thematic strands that allow a more inclusive discussion of cultural practices and perspectives intersecting at the physical and metaphorical site of the urban residential balcony. In doing so, Dresen’s film allows us to untangle thematic strands that intertwine in the narrative as culture-affirming and dissenting practices and underlying perspectives are ambiguously and ambivalently presented through the characters. The film references and adapts cinematic genre conventions of the street film by foregrounding the site of the urban residential balcony and by elevating it to character status in the film (Ganeva 5). The balcony’s changing functions in the narrative mirror the experiences of its occupants. At the end of the film, visual impressions of the balcony (without residents) conclude the story and leave the audience to reflect on its role. The final scenes present the balcony ambivalently as the site of new beginnings and a return to old practices and form a thought-provoking conclusion to the film with visual prompts that ambiguously suggest continuity and change. The film’s last shots show the apartment building wrapped in scaffolding and a bird in flight among falling leaves on a gray autumn day. The images suggest the end of the summer and balcony season and point to closure within the film’s narrative. However, the scaffolding alludes also to the beginning of a new era in Berlin’s neighborhoods. Scaffolded buildings are visual alerts to transition and change brought on by financial investments: costly building renovations result in higher-priced leases and affect demographics in neighborhoods where the lower middle class can no longer afford to live. In yet another surprising turn, the final shot is overlaid with a surprising on-screen caption; it reads Und so weiter… ‘And so on and so forth…’ evoking the notion of continuity and repetition. The epitaph may be read as a prediction: that the characters’ pursuits and struggles might be ongoing and cyclical – and thus possibly representative of general patterns rather than unique and individual circumstances. Leaving the audience with this visual, the film ends.

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Sommer vorm Balkon leaves the audience with an open ending, inviting the viewer to speculate on the characters’ lives after the final fade-out. To imagine the characters’ continued lives and relationships in a plausible continuation of the film’s narrative is an act that challenges the boundaries of the film itself by encouraging its creative use by the viewer. Moreover, it accommodates multiple perspectives based on the plot’s inherent tensions between the characters’ wishful thinking, aspirational goals, resistance to established conventions, culture-affirming and adaptive behaviors, and pragmatic compromises. The thematic strands of the film thus merit, I conclude, an exploration of its culture-specific, culture-general, and transcultural issues. To be sure, the ageold search for meaningful interpersonal relationships includes the negotiation of compromises between ideals and realities. Set on the balcony these negotiations play out at physical, mental, and social sites where, in the interstices between established conventions, the interactants’ roles and identities can be addressed and transformed. Works Cited Aragay, Mireia. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. “Balkonien: Traumurlaub auf 4 Quadratmetern.” brigitte.de. Gruner und Jahr. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Barth, Daniela. “Sommer auf dem Balkon – so wird er stressfrei!” brigitte.de. Gruner und Jahr, 24 June 2014. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Bauer, Petra. “Urlaub auf Balkonien.” writingwoman.de. Petra A. Bauer, 15 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Bondebjerg, Ib. “Coming to Terms with the Past: Post-1989 Strategies in German Film Culture.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1.1 (2010): 29–42. Byram, Michael. From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Essays and Reflections. Oxford: Multilingual, 2008. “Draußen zu Hause – Deutsche entspannen am liebsten auf dem Balkon.” openpr.de. Das offene pr-Portal, 28 Apr. 2009. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Ebbrecht, Tobias, and Thomas Schick. “Perspektiven zum deutschen Gegenwartskino: Zur Einleitung.” Kino in Bewegung: Perspektiven zum deutschen Gegenwartskino. Ed. Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht. N.p.: Springer, 2011. 11–17. Elden, Stuart. “There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space.” Radical Philosophy Review 10.2 (2007): 101–116.

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Einfach Genial! tv Magazin des mdr. “Balkonien: design für den Balkon.” Youtube. Youtube, 18. Aug. 2010. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Fernández Munoz, Yolanda. “Calles en el Aire: Los Balcones de Madera en la Ciudad de los Reyes.” Estudios Sobre América: Siglos xvi–xx. Sevilla: aea, 2005. 905–920. “Ficciones en el balcón.” Archive.org. Internet Archive, 26 Apr. 2011. Web. 9 Oct. 2013. Ganeva, Mila. “Encounters on a Street Corner: Sommer vorm Balkon and the Return of the Berlin Film.” Transit 5.1 (2009): 1–19. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. Glasenapp, Jörn. “Prenzlberger Nächte sind lang: Tragikomischer Alltag in Andreas Dresens Sommer vorm Balkon.” Die Filmkomödie der Gegenwart. Ed. Jörn Glasenapp and Claudia Lillge. Paderborn: Fink, 2008. 289–308. Higgins, James. Lima: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal, 2005. Howard, Tony. “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Ed. Russell Jackson. Cambridge up, 2000. 295–313. Hutchins, Michael. The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide. 2014. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Kostogriz, Alex, and Georgina Tsolidis. “Transcultural Literacy: Between the Global and the Local.” Pedagogy, Culture and Society 16.2 (2008): 125–136. Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford up, 1993. Lefebvre, Henri. La production de l’espace. 4th ed. Paris: Anthropos, 1974. Levenson, Jill L., ed. Romeo and Juliet. Oxford up, 2000. The Oxford Shakespeare – ­Oxford World’s Classics. “Mietrecht: Was auf dem Balkon erlaubt ist.” t-online.de. Deutsche Telekom. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Müller-Ullrich, Burkhard. Komm mit nach Balkonien: Traumurlaub auf vier Quadratmetern. Ostfildern: MarcoPolo/Mairdumont, 2009. National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (sffll). 3rd ed. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language, 2006. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Phillips, June. K. and Abbott Marty. “A Decade of Foreign Language Standards: Impact, Influence and Future Directions.” American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language. 2011. 13 Feb. 2015. Quince, Rohan. Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions during the Apartheid Era. New York: Lang, 2000. Reyna, S. “Balconies: Streets on the Air” Travel Peru. Peru Blog, 2009. 9 Oct. 2013. Sanders, Julie. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Schwarz, Martin. “Die Sozialisierung von Gefühlen.” Zitty 1 (2006): 38–39. Smith, Sabine, and Miriam Bley. “Streets in the Sky: The Balconies of Lima and the Road to Intercultural Competence.” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 7.2 (2012): 143–66.

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Summer in Berlin. [Sommer vorm Balkon]. Screenplay by Wolfgang Kohlhaase. Dir. Andreas Dresen. Rommel Productions and X-Filme Creative Pool, 2005. Titze, Svenja. “Freundschaft – Darstellung einer intimen Beziehung im zeitgenössischen deutschen Film.” Diplomarbeit. U of Vienna, 2011. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. Tristán, Flora. “The Women of Peru.” The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics. 2nd ed. Ed. Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk. Durham: Duke up, 2005. 207–214. Walker, Charles F. “The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories: Architecture and the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83.1 (2003): 53–82. Wehdeking, Volker. Der junge deutsche Film seit 1998: Innovative Impulse, Themen, Literaturadaption. Lille: Germanica, 2009. Winkler, Jürgen. “Eine kleine Balkon-Geschichte.” Juwi’s Welt: Think Global. Jürgen Winkler, 27 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.

Chapter 11

Muslims against Gays? Faith, Sexuality, Resistance and London’s East End Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz Abstract In January 2013, a YouTube video of an alleged ‘Muslim Patrol’ on the streets of London’s East End stirred a heated debate on urban space and its nature. Studies on the existence and resistance of diasporic communities in the cities of the West have focused overwhelmingly on aspects of discrimination and institutional or outright racism. However, the relationship between these migrant communities and increasingly visible ‘sexual minorities’ in urban Britain as well as media representations of this relationship has not been explored so far. The paper aims to examine the representation of contested urban space in one of the videos by the self-acclaimed ‘Muslim Patrol’ and then focus on one prominent media response to the phenomenon of religious homophobia, a bbc clip featuring gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. Combining insights from postcolonial and from cultural studies, it will pay particular attention to the mediation of ethnic and sexual Otherness, to the role of web 2.0 in staging urban protest and reflect on the ambiguous, multi-faceted nature of the concept of ‘resistance’ in this context.

Keywords Muslim-gay relations – “Muslim Patrol” – London’s East End – Peter Tatchell – YouTube – media coverage – postcolonial studies – urban studies – resistance



Introduction

“Gay Free Zone”: in February 2011 street stickers appeared in the East London areas of Tower Hamlets and Hackney which condemned the ‘sins’ of homosexuality and warned of ‘Allah’s punishment’ (Roberts 2011). There was a universal outrage in the London press and media, not to mention in gay newspapers and on online platforms. The gay rights campaigner Jack Gilbert even claimed © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_014

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these stickers to be “the most intense homophobic hate literature campaign since the 1980s battle over section 28” (Jack Gilbert 2011). In June 2011, a local Muslim man pleaded guilty to distributing the stickers after being charged under the Public Order Act (Hill 2011). In January 2013, a number of videos by an alleged self-styled ‘Muslim Patrol’ in East London caused an even greater uproar in the London media landscape. In one of their videos a group of young British Asian Muslims with beards and traditional long robes were patrolling the streets, denouncing people as “faggots”, “whores” and ‘legitimising’ their attacks with the announcement that “this is a Muslim area” (“Muslim Patrol in Waltham Forest” 2013). The nearby East London Mosque quickly distanced itself from the video by claiming that “the actions of this tiny minority have no place in our faith and on our streets” (“Homophobic ‘Vigilante’ Video” 2013). Shortly after the release of the videos, several men from this group were arrested on suspicion of committing Public Order offences (Cameron 2011). Both incidents have raised awareness of inter-communal tensions in this part of the city dramatically, which, as a traditional working class area, had already acquired a certain notoriety because of racist attacks on its growing Bengali community over preceding decades (Keith 144). London with its complex diversity of ethnicities, cultures and lifestyles has a long tradition of accommodating both ethnic and sexual minorities. The British capital is not only one of the leading migrant cities in the world (Ruble et al. 3), it is also the undisputed centre of British lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) groups. However, in East London, particularly in Tower Hamlets, an area with a significant Muslim community (with its roots mainly in the Indian subcontinent) and a documented history of at least one invitation to a homophobic preacher by the East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre (elm), there has been a remarkable rise in homophobic abuse in recent years (Jack Gilbert 2011) of which the stickers and the ‘Muslim Patrol’ are perhaps the most attention-grabbing manifestations. In fact, the relationship of Muslim communities to a growing lgbt visibility in British society is increasingly perceived as a testing ground for the state of 21st-century multiethnic and multireligious Britain.1 In this context, it seems that these outbursts of Islamic homophobia, efficacious especially through their dissemination by the media and their subsequent incorporation into a broader discursive framework

1 Of course, neither ‘Islamic fundamentalists’, ‘lgbt people’ or the ‘gay community’ can be fashioned as homogeneous groups with a common agenda or policy. However, for a lack of more adequate concepts these well-established denominations will be used throughout the paper.

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­ egotiating concepts of ethnicity, sexuality and belonging, are another major n blow to liberal democracy’s vision of a multicultural and tolerant society. Urban studies scholars have investigated the relationship between the revival of religious fundamentalism and the city, indeed describing 21st-century religious radicalism as a predominantly urban phenomenon (AlSayyad 4).2 Both incidents, the anti-gay stickers and the ‘Muslim vigilantes’ video, have triggered manifold responses. Indeed, the era of Web 2.0 with its revolutionary technologies of producing and uploading texts as well as the user’s instant access to the web’s digital archives (Reynolds 56), together with the technologies of mobile phones, has profound consequences on how we perceive our own or any other environment. Users of YouTube and other platforms can position themselves in the role of ‘prosumers’ (producer and consumer) by uploading their own videos, and this vast digital storehouse has led to a circulation of filmic manifestations of urban space on an unprecedented scale. In fact, struggles over the quality and ownership of metropolitan urban spaces are increasingly taking place in the digital universe rather than on the actual streets, supported by web 2.0’s possibility of instant response so that videos can be commented upon and also countered by a filmic reaction. The present paper seeks to explore such a constellation of two videos that form a part of the broader debate on the ‘Muslim Patrol’ on the streets of East London. Focusing on the videos’ representation of urban spaces, the paper will look at one of the videos of Islamic religious homophobia by the ‘Muslim Patrol’, as well as the reaction to it by a representative of the gay community, a news video reporting on the ‘Muslim vigilantes’ from the bbc website in January 2013. Despite the differences of sender, addressee, aesthetic strategy and site of distribution, the way in which both the attack of Islamic fundamentalism and its response produce urban space for the viewer will be explored. In the second part of the paper, the analysis of how urban space is represented in these audio-visual texts will be linked to a wider discourse on the role of resistance, understood as activities that “challenge a particular power, force, policy, or regime” (Roberts 2). Here I will investigate how aptly the concept d­ escribes 2 Not surprisingly, the term ‘fundamentalism’ is contested in sociological research. In this essay, it will be understood in the sense of AlSayyad’s definition of the ideological characteristics of fundamentalists as “reactivity to the marginalization of religion; selectivity in defending certain religious traditions in a manner that differs from mainstream religious practices; a dualistic view dividing the world into good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness; absolutism based on a belief in an inerrant text; and millennialism or messianism in expectation of a holy end to history” (AlSayyad 9). For a discussion of the problems linked to the term, see Strindberg and Wärn 2011 33–42.

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these contesting articulations of urban space, thereby trying to unravel the complexities and ambiguities of the notion of ‘urban resistance’.

The ‘Muslim Patrol’ and Its Spaces of Exclusion

In January 2013, several videos were uploaded on YouTube which showed the alleged activities of a Muslim group in East London, engaged in a night patrol through the East London area of Whitechapel, in the borough of Tower Hamlets, and on their mission to implement Shariah law on the streets of the Western metropolis. One of the videos, 1:12 minutes long, includes oral and written messages and also features the non-diegetic music of what appears to be religious chanting and the sound of gunfire (“Muslim Patrol – Second Video” 2013). In its structure it resembles the format of a tv commercial, with an initial logo advocating the company (Islam) and the product (the prohibition of homosexuality), a main part, which depicts the corresponding strategy in applying the product (an allegedly gay person is verbally abused) and the closing visual image of the product again (an icon showing two men, crossed out). The clip thus signals that its position towards homosexuality is only one of various policies within the tenets of Islam, as indicated by the initial text messages, which announces that “Islam will dominate the world” and quotes a surah from the Qur’an (00:01). The video’s main body shows a fast-walking man being approached by at least two members of the ‘Muslim patrol’ who confront him about his appearance. Whereas one member of the ‘Muslim Patrol’, presumably the man with the camera and with a broad Cockney accent, asks the passer-by about the make-up on his face (00:20), the other voice is posing the question of whether the man is a homosexual (00:22). A few seconds later the first voice accuses the man of being “dressed like a fag” (00:31) and then shouts “you bloody fag” repeatedly (01:00). It also taunts the man as being “dirty” (00:38). The answers of the man are hardly intelligible, due to the limitations of this mode of recording, the effect of which, however, underlines the dominance of the interrogators and exposes the vulnerability of their victim. The first speaker’s repeated assertion of the street being a ‘Muslim area’ features prominently, so that questions of authority over urban space appear as a central claim. Finally, the viewer sees the back of the man quickly escaping from the scene, accompanied by the calls of the ‘Muslim Patrol’ to “get out of this area”, so that he really seems to cede the contested space defined by the verbal claims. This command to ‘get out’ crafts urban space as an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. Following the logic of the film, the inside space of what is called a ‘Muslim area’ is that of a territory

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free of homosexuals and thereby a region of enforced heteronormativity, as opposed to the outside space, in which ‘homosexual vice’ is practiced. Through a form of ‘sexual cleansing’, urban space is supposedly liberated. Recorded while walking and at night and because of its close-up monitoring of the man’s face, urban space itself is only visible in the form of blurred lights and a dimly lit street. A consequence of this is that the verbal designation of it as ‘Muslim area’ becomes even more powerful: urban space is not characterized by its physical qualities, but by what is assumed by the ‘Muslim Patrol’ to be its dominant attribute. It is not only urban space that is hardly present in its physicality, but also the members of the group themselves, whose bodies are invisible. Thus, their representation (no body/domineering voice) is directly opposed to that of the ‘gay man’ (body/soft voice). The high visibility of the victim exposes his vulnerability in what can be seen from a postcolonial perspective as a reverberation of the traditional gaze of the coloniser (and the viewer), who has access to the bodies of the colonised (Spurr 22). The fact that members of a non-Western religion are in the position to exercise this ‘colonial gaze’ in the British metropolis, can thus be read as another potent signifier by which the idea of Islamic domination is underlined. Symbolically, it also entails a reversal of what for many postcolonial scholars can be regarded as the ‘neo-imperial’ marginalization of large parts of London’s non-white population (Gilroy 48). What pervades this and other videos by the ‘Muslim Patrol’ is a rhetoric of ‘liberation’ from the immoral lifestyles offered by the ‘West’. Urban space is engineered as ‘anti-modern’ in the group’s desire for alleged purity. With this, the politics of the faction correspond to what AlSayyad and others have termed the concept of ‘medieval modernity’. In his valuable survey on fundamentalism and the city, AlSayyad also claims that fundamentalism relies on an “ideology of exception and a culture of constant surveillance” and that “cities in the global area are turning into fragmented landscapes made up of spaces of exception” (AlSayyad 24). The ‘Muslim Patrol’s’ verbal attack on a man identified as gay exemplifies this “culture of surveillance”. Their policing of the streets, moreover, brings into sharp focus the question of legality, since the group imposes its self-proclaimed rule over the area and thereby challenges the authority of the administrative institutions of the state. The circulation of the video as a representation of this policy of surveillance has made this strategy of policing the local neighbourhood accessible to viewers all over the world. The makers of this video even created a ‘Muslim Patrol’ channel on the YouTube platform. Examining the digital nature and environment of the clip is revealing. As a video platform of our Web 2.0 era, YouTube “promises immortality to every video uploaded” (Reynolds 62). It not only

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­ ndermines the traditional hierarchies of information control, but also forms u a ‘democratic online space’ and thereby opens up a virtual ‘public sphere’ ­(Abbott 127), which, arguably, stands in direct contrast to the group’s segregational activities. Moreover, since the website also lists videos with a similar theme/title on the same page, the clip is positioned next to a number of other videos, in which Islamic fundamentalism is either propagated or combated, so that the video’s portrayal of claiming ownership over a local neighbourhood in East London becomes part of a larger universe of contesting opinions and interests. In the following, one of these responses to the ‘Muslim Patrol’, with its vision of a space of exclusion and ‘anti-modernity’, will be explored.

The Gay Community Fightback: Spaces of Inclusion

Most of the reactions towards the videos by the ‘Muslim Patrol’ on British television and on the Internet were primarily concerned with the issue of how personal freedom had come under attack by a small group of Islamic radicals. On 30 January 2013, the bbc News website released a clip with the title “Muslim vigilantes: Peter Tatchell on homophobic abuse”. The short film features a statement by Human Rights & lgbt campaigner Peter Tatchell and is a reply that shows Tatchell walking the streets of the East End. The clip starts with footage from several original videos of the alleged ‘Muslim vigilantes’, omitting their self-styled denomination as ‘Patrol’. In a voiceover, Tatchell, whose calm voice contrasts favourably with the shrill calls of the ‘vigilantes’, then summarises the content of the videos and identifies “local Muslims” as the main victims of the group’s policing actions (00:01–00:38). The orchestration of Tatchell’s video is striking, since the original footage from the ‘Muslim Patrol’ shows urban space at night, whereas Tatchell’s stroll around the East London market takes place in broad daylight. Thus, a whole inventory of cultural associations with ‘night’ and ‘day’ come into play. The ‘Muslim Patrol’ operates literally, but also metaphorically, in darkness, opposed to the ‘transparency’ of Tatchell’s walk. This impression is intensified by the blurring of the victim’s faces in the footage of the ‘Muslim Patrol’, inserted in the bbc clip to protect their identity. The anonymity of both victims and their perpetrators together with the poor quality of the footage evoke the city as a dangerous space where invisible enemies prey on their nameless victims. The vigilantes’ attempt at imposing an alternative value system on public urban space makes the viewer aware that urban disorder lurks omnipresent and that the state is absent, evoking a long tradition of crafting urban space as a ‘wilderness’, which can be traced back to 18th-century perceptions of London. From a postcolonial

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angle, the inner-city, through this dichotomy of dark/night and bright/day, is crafted as the space of the ominous, uncivilised Other that has arrived from the former colonial periphery and ‘invaded’ the metropolitan space of the West. The representation of the Muslim community in the video affords illuminating insights. In its portrayal of the ethnic and religious Other, the clip utilises two figures that have become firmly established in the British cultural imaginary: the ‘street rebel’ and the ‘ethnic entrepreneur’. In his study on the multicultural city, Michael Keith contends that the two figures “draw on the historical genealogies of representations of ‘blackness’” and that, generally, the “ethnic entrepreneur is the assimilationist hero, the street rebel the bourgeois nightmare” (82). In the video, both figures are indeed antagonists: while the ‘street rebel’ disrupts urban space in his attempt to impose his own, decidedly non-Western value system on the Western city, the ethnic entrepreneur is established as his positive mirror image, becoming immersed in the circulation of goods and services and thereby conforming to the rules of the capitalist market economy. Both groups, as the video highlights, inhabit the same urban space. Arguably, by choosing the market with its many stalls as the venue for the report, the film extends the threat of the ‘Muslim vigilantes’ to the ‘Muslim community’ itself. As the home of the ethnic entrepreneur the market is endangered by the street rebels, whose call for Shariah law threatens the free flow of goods and services through its many restrictions and thereby undermines the material existence of the ethnic entrepreneur and, by extension, of capitalism itself. The site of the market also implies that homophobia and gay rights are not a central aspect of the community’s existence. It accentuates the normalcy of daily activities of the people in the area. Perhaps more importantly, it harks back to the 1980s representation of East London’s British Asian community as one with an “ethos of hard-work and self motivation”, whose industriousness was at that time contrasted favourably with the allegedly problematic nature of the African and African-Caribbean work ethos (McGuinness 101). Alternatively, the video opens up a dichotomy of the metropolitan centre of the City and the ‘neo-colonial’ inner city areas of East London (Gilroy 34). In the light of early 20th-century metropolitan discourse on the colonial periphery, Tatchell, one can argue, bears some resemblance to the figure of the white explorer on his civilizing mission. This is largely achieved by the silence of the community that is portrayed. As a ‘mediator’ between the locals and the viewer, the explorer explains the mentality of the people around him: “Most Muslim people do not seek to impose their personal beliefs on others. While they may not approve of homosexuality or gay marriage, equally, they do not approve of homophobia […]” (01:34–1:48). Crucially, the camera ­captures

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s­ everal market scenes accompanying Tatchell’s voiceover: people in front of a food stall (01:40), a Muslim woman receiving a mobile phone call (01:46), elderly women in headscarves looking at shoes (01:50). Thus, while the ‘natives’ go about their business, it is the task of Tatchell to tell us what ‘they’ think. Through this mode of representation, the clip presents and interprets the positions of those marked as ‘Muslim’ and thereby resembles the characteristics of colonial discourse, but precludes any form of a dialogue. The exoticist attitude evoked by the clip’s visual and auditive content even tends to “homogenize and reify the Other by creating stereotypes that reduce human agency and cogency to objects of inquiry” (Strindberg & Wärn 3). Consequently, the ‘Muslims’ that Tatchell speaks about do not appear as shapers of public urban space, but rather as subject to their ‘Muslim authorities’, as underlined by his words on the reaction of the East London Mosque and the Muslim Council of Britain to the ‘vigilantes’. Moreover, the way in which Tatchell speaks about the ‘Muslim community’ also remains problematic, even if incidents of ‘religious homophobia’ are the cause of his report. He furnishes all the people with a fixed religious identity, and, interestingly, other markers of Otherness, such as ethnicity, the role of migration, and even cultural or sexual difference are entirely absent, another example of how in recent discourse on ethnic minority communities religious affiliation has become increasingly relevant. It can be argued that the campaigner’s performance, his words, as well as the visual focus on consumption also imply the call for a transformation of the ‘Muslim community’ from that of mere producers and consumers of material goods and religious instruction to that of agents involved in political participation. In turn, this call has profound implications for the representation of urban space, which would then be actively shaped by what Tatchell sees as the ‘Muslim community’. Two versions of urban space are juxtaposed in this video. The vigilantes’ idea of policed streets, as exemplified by the selected footage in the beginning of the video, seeks to establish a zone of exclusion, a homogeneous space governed by the authority of Islamic teachings. In contrast, Tatchell advocates his own version of urban space, based on the principles of an ‘open society’ with its focus on equality and inclusion of ethnic and sexual difference. With his emphasis on human rights and rejection of islamophobia and homophobia, Tatchell clearly espouses the dominant values of tolerance and moderation, key principles of the Western conception of liberal democracy, the mantra of contemporary neoliberalism and its envisioning of a ‘borderless’ world. This world has “absolutely no need for ideological residua such as homophobia, sexism, nationalism and racism, all of which only serve to impede the smooth flow of commodities […]” (Jeremy Gilbert 43). The sexual identity of ­Tatchell

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as the gay man penetrating the space claimed by the nightly vigilantes is not even essential here, since, firstly, many viewers will not know him, and secondly, his condemnation of Islamist fundamentalism corresponds to the official stance on homophobia in British politics. This has been expressed, for example, by pm Tony Blair in his 2007 speech at gay organisation Stonewall’s annual Equality Dinner, or in pm David Cameron’s recent espousal of gay marriage in his speech at the 2011 Conservative Party Conference (Guardian 2011). Finally, the clip can be seen in the light of a re-appropriation of urban space. In a rhetoric of ‘common interest’ Tatchell, and, by extension, the gay community reclaim the space that the nightly ‘Muslim patrol’ has occupied. As shown, various strategies are employed to counter its segregational claims to urban space. However, the price for this determined stance against all forms of discrimination is a representation of urban space that sees it as a territory inhabited by people with mutually exclusive identities (the ‘Muslim’/the ‘lgbt person’) and thereby constructs urban space as overlapping territories for different groups rather than a dynamic transcultural space in which multiple contesting constellations of identity formation are practiced. Yet these homogenizing strategies, one could argue, can be regarded as part and parcel of any politics of representation, specifically in a short video clip designed to inform the larger public on issues of homophobia. On Tatchell’s personal website, the campaigner identifies “sectarian attacks” as the “real oppressors” in the “struggle for human rights, social justice, peace and anti-imperialism” (Tatchell, no date given). The video contributes to a larger discourse that attempts to make the ‘global city’ (Jacobs 31) governable by addressing the contesting interests of its many groups. Of course, here Tatchell seems to subscribe to an essentialist universalism that ignores the social and economic marginalization of ethnic communities in Western postcolonial cities and that is therefore lambasted by scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities. However, it would be equally reductive to read Tatchell’s report simply as a perpetuation of neo-Orientalist condescension. In recent studies on postcolonialism, the discipline’s insistence on ‘anti-essentialism’ has come increasingly under attack, particularly for its tendency to neglect ‘real’ postcolonial struggles in favour of lofty theories on fluid relationships which often “obfuscate the very idea of resistance, struggle and even of people” (Sethi 12). The responses to religious homophobia, exemplified in Tatchell’s video, can also be seen as countermeasures to the tendency of urban fragmentation espoused by diasporic communities in London’s East End. Finally, the video seems to mirror the desire of the white British intelligentsia to imagine their multi-ethnic urban environment as what has been termed ‘new exoticism’ (McGuinness 110): a space of inclusion, of equal opportunities, equal rights,

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and a space of freedom that enables all individuals to gain access to the spoils of products and lifestyles in the postcolonial Western metropolis.

Conclusion: The Politics of Urban Resistance

Having explored content and aesthetics of the two videos and their representation of urban space, what are we to make of the concept of ‘urban resistance’ in this context of religious homophobia by Muslim groups or individuals? And what of the reaction by gay campaigners and their precarious position within hegemonic discourse on urban space? As will be illustrated below, the investigation into incidents of Islamic homophobia and the gay community’s response puts our concept of urban resistance to the test. The seemingly growing strength of urban religious fundamentalism, of which the videos by the ‘Muslim Patrol’ comprise a worrying example, poses a challenge not only to urban spaces, but also to theoretical explorations of the concept of ‘resistance’ in academic circles, particularly in Postcolonial Studies. Here, resistance is primarily conceived of as counter-hegemonic activity, either a reaction to colonial or neo-colonial oppression, or manifestations of social, economic, ethnic, cultural and gender-based exclusion. When applied to the responses of the ‘gay community’ to an alleged takeover of parts of the city by Muslim fundamentalists, the academically safe territory of ‘urban resistance’ as a label for how minority groups claim or reclaim urban space becomes less safe, since the scenario beloved by scholars within the field of postcolonial studies, the “seductive realm of resistance” of the powerless against the dominant forces (Jacobs 15), is put into question. Due to the discipline’s research targets and political preferences, postcolonial urban studies on the existence and resistance of diasporic communities of former colonial territories in the cities of the West have focused overwhelmingly on aspects of discrimination, thereby providing important insights that have led to a better understanding of the complexities involved in overcoming institutional racism. Literary and cultural studies have likewise foregrounded aspects of how migrant communities in London and other British cities are marginalized and discriminated against, particularly again in the field of Postcolonial Studies. However, the relationship between sexual minorities and these diasporic migrant communities remains a lacuna of contemporary research on the postcolonial city. Indeed, within the disciplines of sociology, urban studies or Postcolonial Studies, so devoted to uncovering the structural injustice inherent in the neoliberalist framework of the Western economic

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s­ ystem, criticism of those seen as victims in our globalising world is regarded as a tricky territory or even unthinkable (Brenner et al. 5; Ruble et al. 7; Eagleton). Recent theories have to some extent abandoned the strict binary models and rather emphasized the multi-faceted nature of articulations of resistance, in which “the groups are not unified under any single authority but rather relate to each other in a network structure”, as, for example Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out (Hardt & Negri 86). However, structurally the concept is still rooted in a conflict between hegemonic and non-hegemonic forces. In the scenario of a struggle between members of two minority groups, the question of ‘resistance’, with its largely positive connotation, therefore becomes problematic, particularly as one of these groups fashions an agenda that appears anti-democratic and segregational. As studies on Islamic fundamentalism in Western Europe suggest, the majority of these ‘radical’ actions has to be understood primarily as “a matter of generic human efforts to reconstruct and affirm collective identities in a context of social and cultural marginalization” (Strindberg & Wärn 170) and, consequently, as testimony to “the prodigious capacity of capitalism to produce victims” (Rocamora xi). In this light, the demand of the ‘Muslim Patrol’ of ownership of urban space in the name of a collective and the corresponding disciplining of ‘unruly outsiders’ comprises a reaction against the ongoing marginalization and economic deprivation of their community, mirroring part of the mainstream media’s continuing conceptualization of Muslim minorities as outsiders and alien (Strindberg & Wärn 171). It also ties in with theoretical perspectives on the rising role of religious fundamentalism as “an important means of resistance against the hegemonic forces of globalization” (AlSayyad 3). On the basis of these evaluations of ‘Muslim resistance’, could one not, therefore, argue, that the spatial segregation intended by the ‘Muslim Patrol’ represents the uncanny mirror image to the zones of exclusion resulting from the processes of gentrification or the ‘white flight’ into suburban areas of the city? The videos of the ‘Muslim Patrol’ fashion an articulation of resistance in their portrayal of an anti-establishment grassroots movement of urban discontent that subverts hegemonic productions of inclusive urban space. Their videos, from this perspective, represent a bottom-up strategy of resistance, thus sharing a major characteristic with other, well-documented subcultural struggles over urban space and casting the ‘Muslim Patrol’ in the role of the ‘urban underdogs’. As a response to these threats of exclusion, the efforts by gay rights campaigner Tatchell, who can be said to speak on behalf of the gay community

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to defend their emancipatory achievements, is also a manifestation of urban resistance, a new link in a long chain in the struggle for acceptance and recognition. For example, the numerous Gay Pride demonstrations across Britain have served to establish or maintain the presence of the lgbt community as part of the city.3 Claiming the streets as a form of popular protest has been crucial for the articulation of gay people’s ‘right to the city’, to use the sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s eponymous phrase, particularly as a form of resistance to the ubiquitous presence of normative heterosexuality in public space (Tyner 55). While, especially (but not only) in more rural parts of Great Britain, discrimination against lgbt people is still existent or even endemic, it seems, however, that incidents committed against lgbt people in the name of Islamic religion have emerged alongside or have even to some extent replaced the ‘traditional homophobia’ of mainstream society in the metropolis (Jack Gilbert 2011). This, then, has profound consequences for the representation of urban space, in which the gay community has to voice its presence not only against the intolerance of mainstream society (white, English-speaking and middle class), the traditional target of gay rights campaigning, but rather fight Islamic fundamentalism’s claim to moral authority. Yet the typical characteristics of resistance as a form of anti-establishment protest and subversion against the dominant order seem ambiguous when looking at Tatchell’s video, since gay rights are here demanded in accordance with hegemonic notions of ‘equality’. Arguably, the video, put online on the bbc website, poses an affirmative contribution to the ‘production’ of urban space as one in which products and identities can circulate freely and in which existing patterns of social and economic exclusion remain invisible. Contrary to the clip by the ‘Muslim Patrol’, it encompasses a top-down articulation, distributed by the bbc as the primary mouthpiece of hegemonic ideology. ­Actually, a recent study has claimed a correspondence between a society’s acceptance of homosexuality and its enhanced economic performance (Donovan 2013), and the world’s top companies flaunt their policies of gay-friendly working environments, exemplifying the embracing of sexual diversity in contemporary economics (Reid-Smith 2013). Could one say, then, that gay people have now made it to the status of respectable citizenship so that their visible presence in the city no longer entail notions of resistance? Are we, at least in the Western metropolis (and in stark contrast to most other global regions), now living, as some scholars remark, in a ‘post-gay’ world (Gilreath xi)?

3 For a history of Pride demonstrations for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people, see, for example, Cook (180–188).

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On a more abstract level and beyond the confines of the values of liberal democracy, one can see these struggles between different factions over authority in local neighbourhoods even as a desirable systemic condition that directs attention away from the power structure of the system itself, yet mirroring its fetishization of competition. Here the Muslim radicals generally represent a more threatening force, since their resistance targets the system itself, intending an overthrow of the capitalist world order and its multiple forms of inclusion, of which the visibility of gay people is a vital token. The gay movement, on the other hand, is a far less dangerous opponent, since it overwhelmingly asks for participation and even assimilation, as exemplified in Tatchell’s video. The manifold responses to the videos of the ‘Muslim Patrol’ in the mainstream media illustrate this menace of ‘inflammatory’ Islamic fundamentalism (Silverman 2013). A debate around those incidents linked to religiously inspired homophobia in East London, it can be argued, also addresses the complex relationship between local practices and global influences. As Peter Smith contends: Since human agency operates at many spatial scales, and is not restricted to ‘local’ territorial or sociocultural formations, the very concept of the ‘urban’ thus requires reconceptualization as a social space that is a crossroads or meeting ground for the interplay of diverse localizing practices of national, transnational, and even global-scale actors, as these wider networks of meaning, power, and social practice come into contact with more locally configured networks, practices, and identities. (127) Alongside the question of resistance and indeed closely connected to it, this seems to offer another conundrum. It is interesting to ask who is who in these urban conflicts involving religion and sexuality. Can the visibility of gays, lesbians and transgender people be attributed to such global-scale factors, a global movement in the Western world that started with the proclamation of gay rights in the wake of the now almost legendary Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 (Jivani 159–61)? Would that place the Muslim communities in East London’s Tower Hamlets in the position of those “locally configured networks, practices, and identities” that resist the hegemonic tendencies of globalization and the essentialism of universal human rights? Or, is it the other way around: is the locally grown acceptance of gay, lesbian and transgender identities in London falling victim to a transnational, globally present Islamic movement? Ultimately, both videos take part in the production of urban space as a site of ongoing conflict between different groups, either hegemonic or non-­ hegemonic, or oscillating between those two poles. An investigation of the

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­videos of the ‘Muslim Patrol’ and its responses demonstrates how these conflicting representations of urban space circulate to reach an audience far wider than the local neighbourhoods in which these struggles arise. The events around Islamic religious homophobia in London’s East End are a vital testimony to the multiple processes of exclusion and negotiation that will become increasingly central to how we make sense of the city and urban spaces in the West. Crucially, it sheds light on the limitations of our traditional, binary concept of urban resistance, but it also problematises postcolonial scholarship’s inclination to perceive all struggles of minority groups as liberatory, as answers to processes of discrimination and marginalization and therefore as imminently laudable. What is needed is a critical rethinking of the concept of resistance that encapsulates the complexities of urban struggles among groups and ­actors − or perhaps, a new conceptualization and an accompanying terminology that can grasp the dynamics of urban conflict beyond that of the struggle against hegemonic forces. This is all the more necessary in an age of accelerated globalization and migration, in which the vortex of capitalism, with its emphasis on an unproblematic ‘borderless inclusion’, entails clashes of cultures and value systems on an unprecedented scale. Finally then, this example of minority groups struggling against other minority groups in the city is perhaps itself an act of resistance, resistance against our comfortable methodological spaces and categories. Works Cited Primary References

“Muslim Vigilantes: Peter Tatchell on Homophobic Abuse.” bbc News. bbc, Web. 30 Jan. 2013. Muslim Patrol. “Muslim Patrol – Second Video – Gay Man Told to Leave ‘Muslim Area’.” YouTube. YouTube, 22 Jan. 2013. Web. 5 June 2013a. Muslim Patrol. “Muslim Patrol in Waltham Forest.” YouTube. YouTube, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 26 June 2013b.

Research Literature

Abbott, Jason. “[email protected] Revisited: Analysing the Socio-Political Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in East Asia.” People Power in an Era of Global Crisis: Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation. Ed. Barry K. Gills and Kevin Gray. London: Routledge, 2013. 126–150. AlSayyad, Nezar. “The Fundamentalist City?” The Fundamentalist City? Religiosity and the Remaking of Urban Space. Ed. Nezar AlSayyad and Mejgan Massoumi. London: Routledge, 2011. 3–26.

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Brenner, Neil, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer. “Cities for People, not for Profit: An Introduction.” Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. Ed. Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer. Routledge: London, 2012. 1–10. Cook, Matt. “From Gay Reform to Gaydar: 1967–2006.” A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages. Ed. Matt Cook. Oxford: Greenwood, 2007. 179–214. “David Cameron’s Conservative Party Conference Speech in Full.” The Guardian Online. Guardian News and Media. Web. 5 Oct. 2011. Donovan, Paul. “Comment: Equal Marriage Will Boost the Economy.” Pink News. 7 June 2013. Web. 26 June 2013. Eagleton, Terry. “The Liberal Supremacists.” The Guardian Online. Guardian News and Media, 25 April 2009. Web. 5 June 2013. Gilbert, Jack. “Could Community Relations Survive a Homophobic Campaign?” The Guardian Online. Guardian News and Media, 12 July 2011a. Web. Gilbert, Jeremy. “Against the Commodification of Everything: Anti-Consumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis.” Cultural Studies and Anti-­Consumerism: A Critical Encounter. Ed. Sam Binkley and Littler Jo. London: Routledge, 2011b. 33–48. Gilreath, Shannon. The End of Straight Supremacy. Realizing Gay Liberation. Cambridge up, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Hill, David. “Courage and Constructiveness Distinguish East London Pride March.” The Guardian Online. Guardian News and Media, 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 26 Sept. 2011. “Homophobic ‘Vigilante’ Video Appears Online.” bbc News. bbc, 22 Jan. 2013. Web. 5 June 2013. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1996. Jivani, Alkarim. It’s not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana up, 1997. Keith, Michael. Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism. London: Routledge, 2005. McGuinness, Mark. “Geographies with a Difference? Citizenship and Difference in Postcolonial Urban Spaces.” Postcolonial Geographies. Ed. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan. New York: Continuum, 2002. 99–114. “‘Muslim Patrol’ Gang: Police Arrest Three more after Homophobic Video.” The Guardian Online. Guardian News and Media, 24 Jan. 2013. Web. 5 June 2013. Reid-Smith, Tris. “Top Firms Meet to Discuss how to Use lgbt Diversity to Drive Business.” GayStarNews.com. 12 March 2013. Web. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber, 2011.

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Roberts, Neil. “Gay Groups Divided Over East End Pride March.” Hackney Citizen O ­ nline. 12 March 2011. Web. 5 June 2013. Rocamora, Joel. Preface. “People Power is Alive and Well.” People Power in an Era of Global Crisis: Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation. Ed. Barry K. Gills and Kevin Gray. London: Routledge, 2013. Xi–xiv. Ruble, Blair A., Lisa M. Hanley and Allison M. Garland. Introduction. “Renegotiating the City.” Immigration and Integration in Urban Communities: Renegotiating the City. Ed. Blair A. Ruble, Lisa M. Hanley and Allison M. Garland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 2008. 1–16. Sethi, Rumina. The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance. London: Pluto, 2011. Silverman, Rosa. “Muslim Patrols Could Become More Prevalent and More Violent, Warns Anti-Extremist.” The Telegraph Online. Telegraph Media Group, 30 Jan. 2013. Web. 5 June 2013. Smith, Michael Peter. Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2011. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke up, 1993. Strindberg, Anders and Mats Wärn. Islamism. Religion, Radicalization, and Resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Tatchell, Peter. “Academics Smear Peter Tatchell.” N.p., n.d. Web. 5 June 2013. Tyner, James A. Space, Place, and Violence. Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender. New York/London: Routledge, 2012.

Chapter 12

Scenic Subversions: On Bruce LaBruce’s Re-queering of That Cold Day in the Park Ger Zielinski Abstract In this paper I offer a comparison between three main texts – Richard Miles’ That Cold Day in the Park (1965), Robert Altman’s feature film adaptation of the same name (1969) and Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin Off My Ass (1991) – in the service of addressing the question of selected theories of cinematic cities, and the formation and circulation of their image, in relation to resistance in subcultural youth scenes of, in this case, 1990s homocore.

Keywords Bruce LaBruce – cinematic city – scene – publics and counterpublics – queer space – adaptation – homocore – punk

In this paper I reconsider Bruce LaBruce’s underground film No Skin Off My Ass (1993) as both a daring queering of Toronto and an abrasive yet also camp punk re-queering of both Richard Miles’ 1965 novel That Cold Day in the Park but particularly Robert Altman’s 1969 film adaptation of the same name. I also show how LaBruce’s feature film is an extension of his earlier work in homocore1 zine print culture2 of the 1980s in its resistance to what could be ­understood as

* Special thanks to Michael Lawrence (Sussex), whose conversation with me on the work of Gregg Araki and LaBruce at the 2012 World Picture conference at the University of Sussex prompted me to write this paper. 1 The terms ‘homocore’ or ‘queercore’ evolved from punk and hardcore coupled with a gay and lesbian fan base or public by the early 1990s. 2 See, for example, Duncombe’s 2008 study on zines and alternative culture Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture or Klanten’s Behind the Zines: Self-­ Publishing Culture from 2011. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004369313_015

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the mainstream gay culture3 of the time and its effective constitution of a new youth subculture as an alternative to that mainstream.4 A number of film and urban studies scholars have been working on the question of the filmic representation of cities.5 Mark Lajoie provides a cogent treatment of French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s work on the reflexive representation of the city in film. Specifically, the theoretical framework interrogates the city’s representation, its circulation and its folding in upon itself through the film’s narrative as well as the city’s own process of myth building. In a sense, to paraphrase an adage, we live vicariously through the movies. We come to sense other places at a distance through film and other representational media. In his elaboration on Lefebvre’s work, Lajoie6 argues, Although Lefebvre was primarily interested in a form of artistic re-appropriation of the city as a corrective to modern alienation, his conceptualization of the relationship between spatial production and the city can serve as a framework for theorizing the relationship between city space and its cinematic representation, as well as the relationship of both to cultural identity. Urban space affords a sense of spatial coherence to the city as a function of the operation of a spatial imaginary. Film, it can be argued works in an analogous manner; it uses a set of images of specific (discrete) places, objects or styles, which, when selected and combined through montage, produce a cinematic recreation of a distinctive space. (43, my emphasis) However, my specific interest here is not in the representation of the city as some sort of coherent space, but rather in the reflexive imagined nature of the specific films considered. In other words, I seek out precisely how the films play a role in opening up new oppositional and alternative scenes and identities, albeit situated as a lived place, somewhere in particular.

3 I use ‘mainstream’ here in the sense of relative to the larger lgbt group and visible and highly developed bar and dance club culture. 4 This paper also stems from my larger book project on cinematic cities in Canada, namely on the nature of filmic representations of cities and urban culture across the country; it will constitute a part of a chapter on Toronto and its queer spaces. 5 See, for example, Mark Shiel, 2003, on how urban spaces of a city are presented in films that together constitute what he calls a “cinematic city.” 6 For the purposes of this presentation and brevity, I am relying on Lajoie’s interpretation of Lefebvre but will address it more critically in my longer work.

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Lajoie argues for the important role of editing in the way it brings together elements in a city that would otherwise remain disparate; effectively the work of montage affords new constellations of relations between material moments of a city. The time and distance between places may be radically or subtly altered, elongated or compressed, through the act of editing shots together. He posits, […] Films create the impression that the cities they depict are coherent and cohesive through the selective use of images of city life and specific locations. The key difference between urban space and cinematic practice lies in the fact that the space of the city contains elements that urban space cannot directly incorporate within its system of social spatialization. These include residual elements of earlier forms of spatialization as well as alternative or emergent forms of spatial production. These elements can in turn be incorporated into a coherent imaginary city through cinematic editing. Although cinema constructs the city in similar manner, the creation of imaginary continuities between the residual elements influences spatial practice, and opens the possibility for alternative spatial practices and lived experiences of the city that do not conform to the globalizing model of urban space. The city, thus constructed, can act as a space for the articulation of collective values, expressions of common experience, and the development of cultural identities. lajoie 43–45

Guiding my analysis is Lefebvre’s notion of a reflexive relationship between the urban, its spaces and its various types of representations, which I apply to the representations of the cities in the novel and two films situated in their respective cities. I aim to suggest how the three works construct their urban imaginaries. I will consider the three works in turn: first, the novel, second, Altman’s feature film, and finally LaBruce’s underground film. The novel’s author Richard Miles went by many names in his various careers on screen and off. The 1965 novel That Cold Day in the Park was written in English and published under the nom-de-plume ‘Richard Miles’, whose publications also included poetry and screenplays, such as They Saved Hitler’s Brain and The Madmen of Mandoras. Curiously, there is very little information available on this very interesting writer/actor. He was born Gerald Richard Perreau-Saussine in Tokyo in 1938 to a French father and an American mother, and died in Los Angeles in 2002. According to the International Movie Database, Peter Miles, as he was known in his later films, was a

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[t]alented child star of the late-1940s and early-1950s, best known for his film role in The Red Pony (1949). [He] didn’t make it to an adult career. [He] retired and became an appraiser, high school teacher, and novelist. Two of his early novels were twice recipients of the Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Awards. Another of his books was filmed as That Cold Day in the Park (1969). “peter miles”, IMDb

The novel is set in Paris following the Second World War with two main characters, both teenagers, who are trying to survive by their wits, principally by hustling in the old sense of the word, which included theft but also serving as escorts and apparently also renting themselves to lonely older men.7 The story also suggests that the youths’ relationship exceeds its frank and developed homosociality, but as common to the period remains rather laconic and elliptical in this regard. The narrative traces the adventures of the two teenagers as they make their way in a very dark and seedy Paris of the Pigalle and banlieue districts. A middle-aged spinster finds the younger of the two sleeping on a park bench in the Tuileries Garden and invites him home, where she eventually aims to keep him under lock and key in order to satisfy her hitherto repressed sexuality. In the end, his devoted friend comes to rescue him from her apartment. The novel was controversial for its portrayal of such an active deviant female sexuality as well as its amoral young male hustlers. Moreover, the novel was fresh for its frank representation of the sexual culture of Paris of the period, with its brothels, street prostitutes, sex shows, darkened alleys, all described in surprising detail. Effectively, Paris is represented as a seething heterotopia of sexualized spaces, to which even the frigid spinster eventually succumbs upon the death of her mother. The mother’s death releases her from her sexual inhibitions to explore her desires quite aggressively. While the novel investigated the boundaries of the sexual mores of 1950s Paris but is also directed towards an English-language reading public, the first film adaptation required other considerations to make it accessible to the popular and art-house cinema-going publics. While Robert Altman’s filmmaking career did not start with his film adaptation of That Cold Day in the Park, the film turned out to be his breakthrough feature and crucial to his place as an important American auteur director.

7 Much has been written on male prostitution, e.g. Caukins, Elias, Lawrence, among others. Specialized vocabulary includes such terms as, bar hustler, call boy, street prostitute, kept, rough trade, etc.

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Vancouver’s film industry has been long founded on so-called “runaway film productions” that require the location, in this case Vancouver, to serve as somewhere else (Gasher). Most runaway productions entail the effacement of the city alongside a ventriloquism of Hollywood or television voices speaking through it. The small local independent film scene, in contrast, uses the location as a setting. The film industry with the support of the provincial government pitches the locations as perfect generic interchangeable non-places,8 in Marc Augé’s sense of the term (1995).9 Against the grain of the non-place, Altman’s film quite daringly flaunts its non-American location and setting with the explicit intertitle Vancouver, b.c.10 The city represented in the film could have otherwise passed as any of several cities in the United States, notably New England on the other coast. According to Altman in interview, he originally wanted his film adaptation to be set in England for what he perceives to be its more reserved social conventions, but due to budget constraints he chose to make do with Vancouver, a former colonial outpost with similar reserved sensibilities, at least for the director.11 Moreover, Altman’s feature film adaptation significantly reduces or transforms the controversial subject matter to better suit its period. To be sure, the film was shot during a period of incredible social upheaval, with the so-called Summer of Love underway and the Stonewall riots in New York City happened the year of the film’s release. With regards to changes in film culture, the chill of the notorious Hays Production Code was definitely thawing, signaled by the release and incredible success of the film adaptation of Edward Albee’s poignant Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Nichols), itself a deliberate challenge to the Code (e.g. Wittern-Keller). To be sure, Altman’s feature film is self-consciously cautious. For example, the original male teen hustler duo is replaced with a curious brother and sister pair, and the intense homosociality and strong suggestion of bisexuality or homosexuality is displaced by a fleeting remark by the sister’s boyfriend. When he asks the youth why he was lingering in the park and why he would ever accept an invitation to go home with a stranger, the teenager apparently fails to understand here the suggested implication of male 8 9 10 11

Gilles Deleuze appropriates the concept in his own way and renames it the “any-place-whatever”. Grateful to my good colleague Ihor Junyk (Trent) for reviving my interest in Augé’s work. b.c. stands for the Canadian province of British Columbia along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Rachel Walls’ recent book locates the film sequence in Tatlow Park (Point Grey Road at Macdonald Street) in Vancouver, 2013, which is a part of the ongoing Intellect Press series World Film Locations that seeks to name the exact coordinates of films shot in selected cities, whether posing as the host city or as another.

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prostitution. The sister’s boyfriend scoffs and laughs it off, while the youth appears naively baffled. Evidently, the novel’s portrait of the bar hustler culture is eliminated in this film version. Similar to the novel, the spinster character, played by Sandy Dennis, finds the youth in Vancouver’s posh Tatlow Park and invites him home. Her motive to render him a ‘kept boy’ becomes clear as the plot develops. Apart from the repressed spinster character’s erotic fantasy world that has finally begun to emerge through the cracks, the only added hint of perversion would be the unexpected relations between the teenaged siblings. In one of the bathroom scenes, for example, when the two are present together alone in the apartment, each casually bathes naked in the large bathtub – perhaps intimating a vague incestuous edge? This adaptation does not exploit the full range of sexualities or homosociality of the original novel, offers only a few glimpses of Vancouver’s sexual spaces and remains primarily set in the private dwelling of the spinster. The savvy street-smart duo of male teenaged hustlers is replaced by a jejune youth and his older sister, hardly approaching the polymorphous perversity of the original, but arguably more suitable to a film to be released to a broad popular audience in the late 1960s. Decades later, in the early 1990s, Bruce LaBruce made his own version of the film that redresses the relationship between the two main characters,

Figure 12.1

Vancouver, screen shot from nsoma of Altman’s film on television.

Scenic Subversions

Figure 12.2

207

LaBruce, Toronto. Screen shot from nsoma.

while quoting parodically several formal elements of Altman’s film, such as the sound track, tone of the voices, and framings and compositions of sequences, while setting the story in Toronto. His adaptation ups the ante by radically reversing Altman’s calculated discretion by also appropriating elements from gay feature film pornography of the early 1970s porno chic period.12 His approach reappropriates and exploits Altman’s film through strategies of gay camp, to use an older vocabulary, which share the parodic aspect of postmodernist irony (Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern and Politics).13 In LaBruce’s splendidly far-fetched, parodic version, the spinster character is a gay hairdresser, who finds a sullen young sexually-vague skinhead loitering in a downtown Toronto square and invites him home. Effectively, through this representation of the city, “Toronto the Good”14 is rendered ironically into an audacious “Toronto the 12

13

14

In interview LaBruce mentioned that Richard Miles attended the premier of No Skin Off My Ass at the 1992 OutFest Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (Zielinski, Interview). LaBruce has long argued for a revival to camp, and it pervades all his films (See especially (LaBruce, “Notes”), but also his interview (Allen)), and more generally on camp, see Meyer. See Clark for the first references to the moral strictness of the city and the title of ‘Toronto the Good’ for its many Protestant churches.

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Queer.” The parody continues when the hairdresser complains at one point, in a breathy voice that mimics Sandy Dennis’ voiceover in Altman’s film, that skinheads may very well put him and other hairdressers out of business because they crop their own hair. Moreover, the ending is indeed happier than the other two versions for the spinster character, who in this case wins over and ‘converts’ the skinhead into becoming a gay punk with the eager help of the youth’s sister, who states more than once that she would rather her brother be a gay punk than a heterosexual skinhead, for “political reasons”. LaBruce, G.B. Jones and several others formed a close circle of friends who collaborated on a wide diversity of film, writing and music projects. Their work can also be read as evidence of the emergence of a new youth subculture in the 1980s and early-90s. The activities surrounding the production of their j.d.’s zines were chronicled in part in their zines but also in their many super-8 films made by their members.15 These films would both document the punk music performances and be screened during others. G.B. Jones, the lead woman actor was at the time a member of Toronto’s female punk band Fifth Column. Other members of the band make cameo appearances in the film, while the film’s narrative lends lesbian feminism a distinctly exaggerated (­parodic)

Figure 12.3

LaBruce, second bathing scene.

15 Title j.d.’s is an acronym for legalistic term “juvenile delinquents”.

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Figure 12.4

LaBruce, brother and sister.

Figure 12.5 Hairdresser watching Sandy Dennis in the opening of Altman’s film on television.

Figure 12.6 Television shot of credit sequence.

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Figure 12.7 Skinhead in Toronto square.

Figure 12.8 Hairdresser approaches skinhead.

Figure 12.9

First bathing scene.

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r­ evolutionary edge. The group of lesbians in the film meets together to conspire for ­revolution, and the actors in real life are members of the underground lesbian punk band. As in part a document of their scene, LaBruce and G.B. Jones filmed their friends, members of a tightly knit circle. As an illustration, I offer the opening sequence to LaBruce’s film as it sets its tone and parodic relation to Altman’s feature. It is constructed through a careful intercutting of the hairdresser at home watching the opening of the Altman film on television and a sequence that introduces the lone skinhead through various Toronto streets, including the main drag of Yonge Street, till he sits on a park bench in a square with a children’s playground visible behind him. The sequence culminates in the bathing scene after the hairdresser invites the ostensibly mute skinhead home. As I have been arguing all along, cinematic cities have a reflexive quality, namely a general reciprocal circulation of representations of the city, in the city, influencing one another in a complicated dynamic constellation. On the side of reception, the question of publics can be raised, more specifically how are publics constituted in this lively relationship. In his book on his theory of publics and counterpublics, Michael Warner argues that, “all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through address” (114). The realization and circulation of the representation contributes to the constitution of the public under a series of conditions that Warner lays out in his theory. He states, “[t]he direction of our glance can constitute our social world” (89). A public is constituted through mere attention, or without attention the specific public vanishes. LaBruce and his circle were deeply involved in 1980s and 90s homocore zine culture, writing, designing, publishing and mailing out hundreds of copies of each edition. Not only were their zines feeding an emerging youth subculture, they were also providing super-8 films for screening during performances by punk bands, experimental and eventually feature length as in the case of No Skin Off My Ass (see, for example, Gonick). In a short essay, American director Gus van Sant speaks to this point when he states: I had read some of Bruce’s homocore zines called j.d.’s, which made Toronto look like the most outrageously progressive city on the planet. j.d.’s had presented a queer attitude that was youth-oriented, anxious for social and political change, hostile towards mainstream gay culture and put together by people who were territorially committed to their identity as queer kids and not taking any lip from straight society or any other society.

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A somewhat similar assessment is expressed in a synopsis by Brian J. Dillard: The debut feature from Canadian filmmaker and artist Bruce LaBruce, No Skin Off My Ass reunited the filmmaker with G.B. Jones, his collaborator on the early “homocore” ‘zine j.d.s, which helped fuel the late-’80s collision of gay and punk subcultures. Effectively, LaBruce and his circle of zinesters, band members and filmmakers worked to constitute, first, a public and, then eventually, a youth subcultural scene known as homocore, a gay and lesbian scene centred on punk music and punk values of anti-racist, diy anarchist politics, and this was all in opposition to mainstream gay bar and club culture that stemmed from the Stonewall generation.16 The subculture was accompanied by its associated zine and ­experimental film publics that showed how its members dressed and acted, and what they said. According to van Sant, among others, the zines cogently provoked and incited the coming into being of such scenes in cities across North America and favored Toronto as an idealized queer space. Their activities translated and transformed the attitudes and tastes of the larger punk scene into something new as it merged with a constellation of alternative sensibilities of queer youth at the time. Until recently the concept of scene has received little scholarly attention. On the city’s relation to its scenes social theorist Alan Blum writes in The Imaginative Structure of the City, “[t]hrough its scenes the city represents its desire for inhabitation that is both communal and pluralistic on the one hand and, on the other, exclusive, special, and intimate” (183). Apparently, scenes of a city depend and feed on a certain tension between the communal and the intimate. According to Blum’s theory, specifically, each scene mobilizes a desire to participate in a particular set of activities with a certain regularity, without which the scene could not sustain itself. A scene’s ‘extensiveness’ concerns the clarity of its borders or definition; it concerns how accessible it can be without blurring with the rest of the urban culture around it. Related to extensiveness is its mortality or the sense of its end, whereupon a scene’s ‘golden era’ becomes its signature. The scene is also evidence of a desire for communality with collective life, a sort of collectivization. Moreover, scenes take on the character of theatricality, as in the sense of being seen and seeing others, effectively a play

16

Very self-consciously, LaBruce’s film has long sections of breathy voiceover that recount punk subculture which may very well be quoting Hebdige’s work directly.

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between exhibitionism and voyeurism (167–171). Borders and extensiveness in scenes in turn invite transgression and the risk or thrill of their becoming exposed. As Blum writes, [t]he scene is not transgressive because it celebrates “countercultural” values or “lifestyles,” or marginal, esoteric doctrines or even subversive philosophies, but because its transgression resides in its exhibitionism and in the spectacle of its claim to mark itself off from the routinization of everyday life. (174) Moreover, scenes through their projects are related to spectacle, types of longing through chains of promises and unfulfillment that carry with them a transformative potential. The scene’s collective aspect also blurs private and public through the “intimacy of neighbors” as fecund and not moribund, as Blum puts it. The final characteristic that Blum posits is the general political economy of the scene in as much as the scene fends for itself in the marketplace of the city (175–181). On the one hand, we have the long-established mainstream gay culture centered on a network of bars, a scene in itself and evident in the longstanding expression ‘gay scene’. In the early 1970s the gay ghetto’s position in the city was not entirely fixed yet. (Gay West Community Network n.p.) From the 1990s on the apparent cohesion of gay culture into the space of the Village or Ghetto was fragmented in part by the emergence of proliferating alternative and diversity of identity scenes and taste cultures, along with the weakening of the borders of the Village/Ghetto in the face of greater acceptance and selective assimilation. Some of these were oppositional in nature, such as LaBruce’s anti-disco homocore punk scene or simply alternative, as in the case of various sites dedicated to linguistic and racial groups who sought mutual recognition outside of the relatively homogeneous white mainstream of the Village. American cultural theorist Lisa Duggan analyzes the developing gay culture of the 1990s with her concept of homonormativity. Alongside the dedifferentiation and homogenization of gay culture in the United States, Duggan further characterizes the operation of homonormativity as “a new neo-liberal sexual politics” that hinges upon “the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” (179) Furthermore, she argues that this new “politics does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but upholds and sustains them.” To be sure, the oppositional and alternative scenes and accompanying identities demonstrate a range of types of resistance to the larger more popular group identity,

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as it was developing during the period. The specific representation of a range of gay identities in LaBruce’s film suggests their parody and even a satire of homonormativity, a theme that returns throughout the filmmaker’s later work. All three texts considered – Richard Miles’ novel set in Paris, Altman’s film set in Vancouver’s Tatlow Park area, and LaBruce’s parodic adaptation set in Toronto’s gay village, each emphasizes different aspects of their respective cities through their selective representations. While the novel itself explores the dark underworld of Pigalle through the intimate homosocial relationship between its two male hustler characters and the spinster’s disruption of that relationship, Altman’s adaptation puts the emphasis on the perversity of the spinster and her long-repressed sexuality, which he locates in the domestic sphere of her apartment, and finally LaBruce’s rather audacious re-queering of the narrative brings out an oppositional politics that he and his group helped to engender through their underground zine, music and film activities. As I have been implicitly arguing, LaBruce’s film offers an excellent case to examine, even if only suggestively here, the reflexive aspect of circulating representations and the formation of specific cultural scenes. Through his operations of parody, LaBruce’s film effectively subverts Altman’s film and retrieves a queerness akin to the earlier novel but adapted to the local myths and scenes of the Toronto that the characters lived and actors imagined and helped to incite. Works Cited Primary References

Miles, Richard. That Cold Day in the Park. New York: Delacorte, 1965. That Cold Day in the Park. Dir. Robert Altman. Commonwealth United, 1969. Film. No Skin Off My Ass. Dir. Bruce LaBruce. Toronto: Gaytown, 1991. Film.

Research Literature

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Bébout, Robert. “1992–1995: Dancing Boys.” Promiscuous Affections – A Life in the Bar, 1969–2000. Last revised 8 Oct. 2001. Web. 25 May 2013. Caukins, S.E., and N.R. Coombs. “The Psychodynamics of Male Prostitution.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 30.3 (1976): 441–451. Clark, C.S. Of Toronto the Good. A Social Study. The Queen City of Canada As It Is. Montreal: Toronto Publisher, 1898. Dillard, Brian D. “No Skin Off My Ass – Synopsis” AllMovie. allmovie.com Web. 23. Mar 2017.

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Duggan, Lisa, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” ­Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Ed. Dana D. Nelson and Russ Castronovo. Durham: Duke up, 2002. 175–194. xxx Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. Bloomington, in: Microcosm, 2008. Elias, James, et al., eds. Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns. Amherst, ny: Prometheus, 1998. Friedman, Mack. Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture. Los Angeles, ca: Alyson, 2003. Gasher, Mike. Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia. Vancouver: ubc, 2002. Gay West Community Network, “History of Gay Toronto” www.queerwest.org/history .php Web. 23. Mar. 2017. Gever, Martha. “The Names We Give Ourselves.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Russell Ferguson, et al. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. 191–202. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford up, 1992. Hutcheon, Linda The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Klanten, Robert, Adeline Mollard, Matthias Hübner, and Sonja Commentz, eds. Behind the Zines: Self-Publishing Culture. Berlin: Gestalten, 2011. LaBruce, Bruce. Interview by Mark Allen. “Bruce LaBruce’s New Take on Susan Sontag’s 1964 Essay ‘Notes on ‘Camp’.” Huffington Post. 13 May 2013. Web. 30 May 2013. LaBruce, Bruce. “Notes On Camp/Anti-Camp.” Nat. Brut: The Multimedia Literary Magazine. Web. 3 April 2013. LaBruce, Bruce. The Reluctant Pornographer. Winnipeg: Gutter, 1997. Lajoie, Mark, “Imagining the City in Québécois Cinéma” Cahiers du Gerse 3 (2001), 34–54. Lawrence, Aaron. The Male Escort’s Handbook: Your Guide to Getting Rich the Hard Way. Warren, nj: Late Night, 2000. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Blackwell, 2007. Meyer, Moe, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Routledge, 1994. Muñoz, José. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Performance 16 (1996). 5–16. Nichols, Mike, dir. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Warner, 1966. Film. “Peter Miles (i) (1938–2002)” IMDb. International Movie Database, n.d. Web. 3 Jan. 2015. Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice. Screening the City. London: Verso, 2003.

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van Sant, Gus. “Kurt.” Ride, Queer, Ride! Bruce LaBruce. Ed. Noam Gonick. Winnipeg: Plug In, 1997. 136–140. Walls, Rachel. World Film Locations: Vancouver. Intellect, 2012. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge: Zone, 2002. Wittern-Keller, Laura. Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981. Lexington: up of Kentucky, 2008. Zielinski, Ger. “Driving around Los Angeles: The Case of Gregg Araki’s ‘Irresponsible Movie’ The Living End (1992).” (Re)Discovering ‘America’: Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America. Ed. Wilfried Raussert and Graciela MartínezZalce. Trier: wvt, 2012. Zielinski, Ger. Email Interview with Bruce LaBruce. Web. 18 May 2013. Zielinski, Ger. “Queer Theory.” Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. Eds. Gary L. Anderson and Kathryn G. Herr. Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage, 2007. 1188–1190.

Index About Adam (film) 118 Abrahamson, Lenny 13, 112–13, 119 Adam & Paul (film) 13, 112–13, 115–16, 119–26 Adebayo, Diran Some Kind of Black 68 Akomfrah, John 11, 26–27, 31 Ali, Monica Brick Lane 68, 70–71 Altman, Robert 15, 201, 203–09, 211, 214 Attack the Block (film) 130, 132–33, 140–46 balcony 14–15, 168–82 Baltimore 153–54 Barthes, Roland 13, 52, 85–86, 89–91, 93–94 Baudelaire, Charles 6–7 Baudrillard, Jean 13, 91–92 Beckham, David 101 Benjamin, Walter 6–8 Bhabha, Homi K. 12, 26, 51–52 Black Audio Film Collective (bafc)  26–28, 31 Black British Bildungsroman 12, 66–74, 80 Blair, Tony 193 Blum, Alan 212–13 Bombay 12, 50–56, 58 Booth, Charles Life and Labour of the People of London 131 Bourdieu, Pierre 13, 90, 98, 105–08 Breaking and Entering (film) 12, 34, 36–37, 45–47 Brixton Riots 1981 22, 26–28, 30 Burgess, Melvin Hit, The 145–46 Butler, Judith 14, 115–17, 122, 165 Cameron, David 193 camp (style) 94, 201, 207 chav See underclass Clarke, David B. 38, 113, 123, 130, 132 Commitments, The (film) 119 Cornish, Joe 13–14

council estates 21, 45, 68, 73, 75–80, 86, 97–98, 101–02, 106, 122, 130, 133–34, 140–42, 144–45 de Certeau, Michel 38–39, 42, 113 Dent, Grace Diary of a Chav – Trainers v. Tiaras 97, 102–05, 109–10 Dickens, Charles 133, 162, 166 Bleak House 143, 154–56 Dirty Pretty Things (film) 12, 34, 36, 42–47 Dresen, Andreas 175–76 dystopia 13–14, 130, 132–39, 145 Evaristo, Bernadine Lara 70–71 feminism 155, 208 flâneur 3, 6–8 Foucault, Michel 12, 50–52, 58, 60, 79, 153–54, 156, 160, 170 Frears, Stephen 12, 34, 36, 119 Gandhi, Indira 53, 58–60 Gandhi, Mahatma 53 Garage (film) 119 German culture 174–82 ghetto 14, 35, 62, 72–73, 76–77, 130, 132–36, 140, 143, 213 Gill, Elizabeth 118 Gilroy, Paul 23, 26, 189, 191 Gleenan, Kenneth 34, 38, 40 Goldfish Memory (film) 118 Hall, Stuart 11, 21–23, 26, 31, 67, 75, 109 Handsworth Riots 1985 28–30 Handsworth Songs (film) 11, 19, 27–31 hard-boiled 151–52, 155 heterotopia 12, 50–52, 54, 56, 58, 60–63, 204 homelessness 13, 112–18, 120, 122–25, 127 Homicide, Life on the Street (tv series) 152 homocore 15, 201, 211–13 homophobia 15, 185–98 homosexuality 15, 161, 185–98, 201–14

218

Index

Hurd, Douglas 28–29 hybridity, cultural 12, 51–52

Occupy movement 5, 7, 131, 145 Ové, Horace 11, 19, 23–24

immigration 20, 34–36, 38–40, 42–47, 51, 53, 72, 100, 115, 126–27, 185–86, 192–94, 198 Islamic fundamentalism 52–53, 56, 68, 185–98

Parker, Alan 119 Pelecanos, George A Firing Offense 157 Hell to Pay 14, 151–53, 156–66 Midnight Children 12, 50–63 Right as Rain 14, 157 Soul Circus 14, 151, 156–61, 164–66 postcolonial theory 11–12, 15, 19, 26, 39, 88, 185, 189–91, 193–94, 198 Powell, Enoch 21 precariousness (Butler) 115–20, 122, 127, 165 Pressure (film) 11, 19, 23–26, 28–30 Pritchard, Tim Street Boys: 7 Kids, 1 Estate. No Way Out True Story of a Lost Childhood, The 141 prostitution 44, 134, 163, 204–06 public property 124–26 Pulp (band) 13, 85–95

Kohl, Johann Georg 1–3 Kureishi, Hanif Black Album, The 68 LaBruce, Bruce 15, 201, 203, 206–14 Lajoie, Mark 202–03 Lefebvre, Henri 2–3, 6, 15, 169, 196, 202–03 lgbt see homosexuality Lima 14, 168, 170–71, 177 Little Britain (tv series) 102 London Riots 2011 5, 130–32, 137, 145 Lord Kitchener, See Roberts, Aldwyn 20 Lotman, Yuri 12, 37 magic realism 12, 51, 57 masculinity 14, 72, 77, 151–52, 160–65 Mehta, Deepa 53 Mercer, Kobena 23, 25–27 middle class 13, 40, 43, 68, 75–77, 80, 87, 89, 91, 93, 97–101, 104–10, 142–45, 159–60, 176, 179, 181, 191, 196 Miles, Richard That Cold Day in the Park 15, 201, 203–04, 207, 214 Minghella, Anthony 12, 34, 36, 45–46 multiculturalism 26, 125, 155, 186–87, 191 Murray, Charles 72, 75–78, 80 Muslim Patrol 15, 185–90, 193–98 Muslims 15, 36, 40–42, 53–54, 68, 134, 185–98 myth 13–14, 57, 85–95, 160, 166, 202, 214 National Front 21 Nehru, Jawaharlal 53, 56, 58 Newland, Courttia Scholar: A West Side Story, The 12, 72–79 No Skin Off My Ass (film) 15, 201, 206–14 Notting Hill Carnival 22 Notting Hill Riots 1958 22, 27

racism 20–21, 35, 70, 99–100, 125, 165, 185, 192, 194 resilience 61–62 Rex, John 72–73, 75 riots 1–5, 14, 22, 26–30, 56, 130–33, 137, 145, 197, 205 Roberts, Aldwyn 20 Rowling, J.K. Casual Vacancy, The 13, 97, 99, 105–10 Rushdie, Salman Midnight Children 12, 50–63 Satanic Verses, The 51–52 Scarman Report 22, 26 scene (Blum) 212–14 Selvon, Sam 24 Shakespeare, William Richard ii 69 Romeo and Juliet 15, 168, 171–73, 175, 177, 179–81 Shaviro, Stephen 113, 118, 123–24, 128 Shiel, Mark 113–15, 118, 123, 202 Simmel, Georg 5, 163, 165 Sjöwall, Maj 155 Snapper, The (film) 119 social voyeurism 13, 86–87, 90

219

Index Sommer vorm Balkon (film) 168, 175–82 Sontag, Susan 94 Stembridge, Gerard 118 surveillance 4, 35, 39, 43, 125, 189 Sweeney, The (tv series) 152 Tatchell, Peter 15, 185, 190–97 That Cold Day in the Park (film) 15, 201, 203–04 Thatcher, Margaret 21–22, 26, 28, 99 Toronto 15, 201–02, 207–08, 211–14 Toxteth Riots 1981 22, 26, 28 Trigell, Jonathan Genus 13–14, 130, 132–40, 145–46 underclass 12–13, 66–67, 71–80, 93, 97–110, 131–32, 134–41 unemployment 21, 28, 77, 133 urban topography 6, 37, 46, 99, 105, 109, 115, 125 urban topology 37

Vancouver 205–06, 214 Wahlöö, Per 155 web 2.0 185, 187–90 West Side Story (musical and film) 15, 168, 172, 177 Wheate, Alex Dirty South, The 12, 72, 76, 77, 79 East of Acre Lane 12, 72, 76–79 Wilson, William Julius 72, 156 Windrush generation 20, 29, 36 Wire, The (tv series) 151, 153–56, 164 working class 2, 13, 85–91, 95, 97–102, 105, 114, 119, 121, 152, 157, 160–61, 186 workshop movement 26–28, 31 Yasmin (film) 12, 34, 36, 40–42, 47 youth subculture 15, 117, 152, 163, 165, 202, 208, 211–12 Žižek, Slavoy 4, 8