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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 different 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.
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.
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).
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.
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 walled-off 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.
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 paradigm-shifting 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.
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.