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‘Centre and Margins’

‘We lived upon jagged teeth in the dark’: The Housing Estate in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City and Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot

‘We lived upon jagged teeth in the dark’: Le HLM dans In Our Mad and Furious City de Guy Gunaratne and Run, Riot, de Nikesh Shukla.
Rebecca Blanchard

Résumés

Cet article examine la représentation de la cité HLM dans In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) de Guy Gunaratne et Run, Riot (2018) de Nikesh Shukla en utilisant une perspective géocritique. Les deux romans mettent en scène des espaces violents et d’exclusion où les jeunes adultes existent dans des états liminaires apparentés à la « vie nue » d’Agamben. L’absence d’action des personnages de ces romans est rendue encore plus évidente par les thèmes de la surveillance et de l’hypervisibilité. Pourtant, ces romans subvertissent également les représentations de la cité, en la décrivant comme un site hétérogène et multidimensionnel, particulièrement illustré par le potentiel émancipateur offert par la musique rap et grime. En fin de compte, ces romans remettent en question le cloisonnement de la fiction BAME et offrent de nouvelles façons de penser le centre-ville dans la littérature britannique contemporaine.

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1Urban environments continue to be dominated by bitter political and socioeconomic strife, while disenfranchised residents bear the brunt of the concatenated ways in which manifestations of violence interact and blur the lines between the public and private sphere. Recent novels set in such relegated neighbourhoods continue to proliferate in British contemporary fiction, particularly as they offer insights into the paradoxical relationship that youth in these spaces have come to hold with state institutions. Both Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018) depict young adult characters enmeshed in and even swept away by this production of violence. They struggle with the fallout from life on the margins, and more specifically, an existence within a liminal state akin to that of ‘bare life’ as defined by Giorgio Agamben. Facing perpetual states of crisis, these characters are stripped of traditional mechanisms associated with social, economic, and political participation, thus finding themselves reduced to a merely biological existence.

  • 1 Drawing on the work of Edouard Glissant, Chris Bongie argues that the postcolonial, in its relation (...)

2In Our Mad and Furious City, published to critical acclaim and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, harnesses the power of narrative polyphony, by giving voice to five extremely distinct characters: three teenagers—Yusuf, Selvon, and Ardan—and two of their parents—Caroline and Nelson. The reader journeys deep into the interiority of each, as they grapple with what it means to live in London today. The novel also foregrounds the weight of being inextricably linked to an ‘elsewhere’ felt deep in one’s bones, resulting from sentiments of loss and rupture associated with the immigrant experience. An analogous disillusionment affects the younger generation as they wonder what it might feel like to ‘have been moulded out of one thing and not of many’ (Gunaratne 4). Whether this be Pakistan for Yusuf, the West Indies for Selvon and his father Nelson, or Ireland for Ardan and his mother Caroline, a logic of being ‘both/and’1 is inscribed in these first-person narratives particularly through the language used, from Yusuf’s rhythmic urban street banter and foreign borrowed words to the lilting, patois-infused English spoken by Nelson.

3Gunaratne’s novel is also bookended by two distinct manifestations of crisis. First, a viral video clip of a young black boy killing an off-duty soldier from the beginning of the novel imbues the events that follow with palpable tension and acts as a harbinger for the novel’s seemingly inexorable slide towards violent riots following the arson of a mosque. Consequently, as the three youths make their way through the day—or perhaps more precisely as they attempt to ‘outlast the day’ (3)—smaller confrontations, from a tense exchange at a boxing club, a rap battle on a city bus, a spat following a pick-up football game, to a skirmish outside of the mosque, mark the narrative. Tensions continue to be stoked and foreshadow more violence to come. The initial viral video thus becomes symbolic of the assortment of extremisms that converge on this neighbourhood, ebbing and flowing, but never fully dissipating.

4In contrast, Shukla’s Run, Riot, a young adult crime thriller mainly set in a single tower block called Firestone House, differs in narrative structure, tone, and scope. After two teenagers film an incident of police brutality, they find themselves hunted by members of the force seeking to suppress the video footage that could ultimately derail the revitalisation project planned for the building. The youths are forced to evade physical threats from both police and a local gang all the while coping with the symbolic erasure resulting from their impending forced relocation.

5The veiled didacticism of these novels is undeniable. This is likely connected to their heavy reliance on video footage as the catalyst that triggers the narrative events that follow, alongside themes of institutional violence, gentrification, unemployment, and austerity measures. After all, Shukla explains that his novel is a work of fiction that was conceived of and written before the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017, though he admits to the challenge of keeping them separate (see ‘Author’s Note’). And yet, while Gunaratne notes in the Acknowledgements that his novel is about ‘survival’, he first clarifies that ‘sometimes beauty is found in the downright ugly, hard, painful and most neglected of spaces’ (289).

6As a result, it is critical not to view these novels reductively because while In Our Mad and Furious City and Run, Riot are politically engaged works of fiction, such limiting designations are often used to disassociate pieces of writing from their aesthetic value. To do so is ultimately to reproduce what Kobena Mercer explains is the ‘neglect of the aesthetic dimension that has contributed to the current state of play whereby black artists in Britain may be recognized, acknowledged, and tolerated in the art world, but the work itself often seems to be taken less seriously as an enriching site of aesthetic experience’ (71). Social engagement and stylistic richness are certainly not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, scholarship focusing on the aesthetic qualities of contemporary fiction set in urban spaces of relegation (like the council estate) remains lacunary as the study of second and third‑generation writers of South Asian and West Indian descent in Britain faces similar challenges to those noted by researchers in the wider field of black British literary studies.

  • 2 The term ‘BAME’ remains quite problematic. As Afua Hirsch aptly notes, ‘. . . British people have r (...)

7This article argues that the increased compartmentalisation of BAME fiction is implicitly called into question by these narratives.2 The cast of characters in both novels, whether that be Gunaratne’s ‘mandem’ or Shukla’s ‘fam’, is anything but monolithic. Instead, the pluralistic dimension of minority identities is intimately explored in these novels. The limits of alterity and ethnicity are then shifted, and even redefined, to underscore the dominance of socioeconomic segregation that characterises the everyday lives of these protagonists rather than that of ethnic segregation that tended to define postcolonial and immigrant fiction of previous decades.

8This analysis will first consider how a geocritical approach can produce more dynamic readings of contemporary inner-city fictions, before examining how the housing estate is represented more specifically as a site in which the ‘state of exception’ has become generalised. The lack of agency associated with ‘bare life’ in these spaces is then rendered more salient through themes of surveillance and hypervisibility. Yet, these novels also represent the council estate as multi-dimensional. The youths of the estate are renewed and revitalised through creative processes, particularly that of rap and grime music, which offer them a form of deliverance from the state of crisis that underpins urban life. Mobilising these concepts will allow for new ways of understanding how contemporary fiction represents estate residents confronted by the thresholds and limits that epitomise the modern cityscape.

Reading Inner-City Fictions Geocritically

9Gunaratne and Shukla’s novels are certainly indebted to writers like Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland. Both popularised the housing estate in contemporary fiction and use urban settings to examine the kaleidoscopic, complex and even contradictory dynamics associated with multi-ethnic communities. Similarly, Gunaratne and Shukla also participate in the subversion of analogous urban discourses. Yet scholarly readings of novels set in the council estate tend to reinforce pre-existing literary hierarchies, particularly those associated with popular genre fiction.

10While black British and Asian British forms of writing should not be conflated since these works draw on distinct and heterogeneous histories, heritages and experiences, comparative readings of these novels can be useful, particularly when considering how they subvert the dominant representations of the housing estate. In this sense, a geocritical approach is becoming ever more useful for broader readings of inner-city fictions since they allow us to consider how these urban spaces are being depicted across contemporary fiction.

11Werner Sollors raised the dangers of basing literary categories on descent, noting that such an approach could result in a weakening or erasure of literary movements (14). For instance, categorising Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara and LeRoi Jones by ethnicity could neglect their role in the Beat Generation or in the 1950s New York poetry scene (14). Similarly, Bertrand Westphal notes the dangers of maintaining impenetrable barriers around literary categories based on ethnicity—as in the case of ‘immigrant literature’ or beur fiction in France—which runs the risk of inadvertently ghettoising authors (66).

12A geocritical approach to contemporary inner-city fictions therefore encourages us to draw on the analytical potential offered by an interdisciplinary approach based in spatiality, which is particularly relevant to the contemporary era marked by crisis as well as epistemological and ideological instability. Building on the foundational texts of the ‘spatial turn’ (Lefebvre, Bachelard, Soja, etc.), Westphal highlights the strength of a dialogical thinking of spatiality, in which ‘real’ places are better understood through analyses of their fundamental ‘fictionality.’ He affirms:

The specificity of geocriticism lies in the attention it pays to a place. The study of the viewpoint of an author or of a series of authors, which inevitably posits a form of identity, will be superseded in favor of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view, which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis. A multifocal dynamic would be required for this analysis. Without hesitation, I would say that multifocalization is the chief characteristic of geocriticism. The multiplication of points of view renders all the more visible the sensory perception, or sensual perception, that the authors have of space. (122)

13In other words, when the study of literature is first organised by geographical sites rather than by genre or author, a narrative centred on polysensoriality would encourage an exploration of the different sensory experiences associated with a specific place. Readings of clichés associated with a particular site would also be possible. This could result in a deeper understanding of perceptions and manifestations of trauma associated with the multi-ethnic cityscape. As Gunaratne and Shukla’s novels deconstruct stereotypes associated with national identity, belonging and marginality in the housing estate, this approach would also allow us to also consider these novels within a broader group of fictions set in the council estate, particularly as representations of these urban spaces continue to proliferate.

14Thus, this approach paves the way for considerations about the representation of the housing estate in contemporary British fiction across ethnicities and genres. Moving forward, it will be crucial to examine the inner city in crime novels and science fiction—particularly with the emergence of new Afrofuturistic representations—as a means of better understanding how these genres continue to write back against well-established literary norms. Recognising the heritage of these novels is crucial as is drawing connections with recent works like Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing (2017) whose novel hinges on a particular moment of crisis—the shooting of Mark Duggan—in a similar way to Gunaratne and Shukla’s work, while also queering fiction set in the housing estate.

15Finally, geocriticism also highlights space as polychronic. As Westphal notes, ‘The fictional text brings out all the folds of time relating to a place’ (143). This can provide a useful method for approaching polyphonic narratives and more specifically the temporal layering of space that both works feature. This is particularly striking in the case of Nelson’s chapters in In Our Mad and Furious City, though the way community memory-making becomes intimately tied to the architecture of Firestone House in Run, Riot could also be examined through this lens. Ultimately, this approach helps to deconstruct the stereotype of the housing estate as a lawless space of criminality because it instead becomes a site for postcolonial memories to converge and diverge around a central narrative, shedding light on forgotten histories of the city.

16Indeed, the prologue to In Our Mad and Furious City positions the space of modern-day London at the centre of the narrative that follows. It draws a particularly evocative portrait of the urban landscape, one that is as brutal as it is unflinching:

See London. This city taints its young. If you were from here you’d know, ennet. . . . We were all born into the menace from day dot.
These were the hidden violences. Day
-long deaths that snuffed out our small and limited futures. We grew up around these towers, so struggle was a standard echo in our speech, in thought, in action. (Gunaratne 1)

17Yusuf captures the viciousness of life in a city fraught with pitfalls and the use of gradation particularly demonstrates the city’s power to permeate the minds and bodies of its residents. A comparable simmering fury can also be found in the prologue to Run, Riot when describing everyday life in the estate.

18The cityscape is represented as a powerful entity in both novels and the omnipresence of spatiotemporal markers serves to reinforce the housing estate’s dominance over its residents. Both novels are for the most part set over 48 hours, with Run, Riot very frequently using timestamps to mark periods as short as two minutes in length. While Firestone House embodies a ticking time bomb, a temporal heaviness is equally felt by characters in Gunaratne’s novel. Yusuf, for instance, explains that he relished the time spent playing football with his friends and all he could ‘hope to do . . . was take as much time, cotch normally and steal as much love from [his] breddas, from Square and football, as [he] could’ (64). This represents a reprieve for him, particularly as he associates ‘a lightness to these collective moments’ (64). And yet, he is wary, knowing that members of his mosque will come for him eventually. A sense of longing marks his reflections over the pages that follow, as he states that he ‘still had time’ (67) and then wistfully comments moments later that he ‘knew it would have to end though’ (69). This scene foreshadows the news that time is indeed running out for him as preparations are being made to send him to Pakistan.

19In the wake of the riots at the end of the novel and following his untimely death, Yusuf’s nostalgia and the importance he assigns to those stolen moments with Selvon and Ardan acquire even more significance (287). Yusuf’s chapters come to exemplify the ways in which both time and space narrow as the estate exerts its force on the residents. When Yusuf thinks of his brother Irfan, he notes: ‘Time never felt more like an enemy to my brother, losing his battles by acre to some ceaseless djinn . . . Nothing in these Ends can last so easy’ (286). It is worth noticing that the forcefulness of defeat and futility is conceptualised spatiotemporally, rather than purely qualitatively.

20In addition to the limited timeline of both novels, the space of the housing estate is also clearly delineated, further emphasising its self-containment and detachment from the city proper. Strong local ties to the estate thus define the younger generation’s relationship to urban space with few references made to the wider neighbourhood. After all, the majority of In Our Mad and Furious City is set in a housing complex comprised of four apartment towers. The narrative structure further accentuates this closed space with precise chapter headings like: ‘Estate,’ (9) ‘Square’ (39) and ‘Ends’ (81).

21In the first scene of the novel following the prologue, Selvon goes for a run, taking on the role of an urban cartographer. As he lays out the topography of the estate, rapid geographic references pepper his commentary serving to mimic his footfalls in the narration: ‘South Block over my head now’ (9), ‘I turn a corner and go past West Block (10), and ‘I get to the corner of West and North Block’ (11). These first pages also destabilise traditional notions of what it means to belong to the estate. The housing block provides a substitute for kinship for Selvon, though he does not actually live there. Indeed, in the opening scene of the novel, Selvon feels ‘blessed’ (9) to live in another neighbourhood.

22While Selvon’s social capital produces an illusion of belonging, he nevertheless expresses a vague discomfort with the tenuous relationship he has with the estate and particularly its lack of economic potential:

See the four blocks rising behind the shop roofs, red shells and pointed arches pitched at the sky. I pick my pace up as I run through the market. Proper orphaned corner, this. Full of absent people stuck between bus stops and bookies. See them shuffling bodies. Lining up at cash machines and dole queues. Man only come around these Ends for a barber’s, canned food or like batteries. Nuttan more. Pure minor commerce. (9)

23Yusuf also wryly evokes the neighbourhood’s economic challenges by referring to his breakfast as ‘austerity chicken’ (31), while in Run, Riot, Hari is remunerated in mangoes rather than money at his part-time job (24).

24And yet, while both novels feature moments of humour and word play when referring to the lack of economic prosperity, the reader is quickly reminded that the estate remains dangerous. Selvon mentions that streets are already ‘cordoned off’ (12), a mere precursor to Yusuf’s chilling reminder that there are streets that are safe and many that are not (26). Even Caroline notes the menacing air of the housing estate:

That North Block with its grey and cold. And the Market Street that leads all the way to the Square like a long dull parade. There’s not all that many roads that go to the North Block except this one through the bridge. It’s as if the Estate has been fixed there at the end of the road looming over and making a shadow. (55)

25The use of capitalisation throughout the text renders the novel’s spatial topography ever more present along with the stifling sense of isolation it creates.

26Just as Frantz Fanon emphasised the compartmentalisation associated with colonial power structures, Gunaratne’s London is organised according to such a logic. It is unsurprising that governmental interventions in these spaces have thus been compared to modalities of colonial administration of the past. The city is a world divided and the council estates remain separate from the rest of the city in these depictions. The tower block that serves as the primary setting for Run, Riot takes that compartmentalisation to the extreme as the different floors of the apartment building come to represent various dangers usually spread throughout the urban space.

Bare Life, Surveillance and Hypervisibility in the ‘Ends’

27As the novels progress, the estate’s ruthlessness always seems to find a way back to the forefront. In particular, an emphasis on the spatial allows for an elaboration of the power structures that have significant repercussions on everyday life for these characters. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that the camp, as a space of exception, must be understood more so as a condition that exists in potential within the political structure. In other words, the space of the camp is not defined by the atrocities that occur, but rather by the potential for injustice that exists. It is to this condition that the bare life of the homo sacer is banished, where those who are banned (usually by the sovereign) from the domain of political beings are reduced to an existence solely as biological beings (183). This state strongly resembles the experience described by many characters in the two novels and can be employed as a springboard that encourages a deeper understanding of the everyday condition of social exclusion and the lack of agency described in these novels.

28In particular, the personification of the housing estate amplifies its ability to aggressively act upon and taint the life of each resident. In Run, Riot, the building is ‘malevolent’ (84), with hallways that ‘breathe’ (81). Yusuf describes the estate as a place ‘where the city’s resentment collected, got into the air, the pipes, for those who lived here to live off’ (112). Taran even feels that the building is full of ‘[t]ractor beams everywhere, pulling [her] in’ (84). This extends past the estate to the cityscape in Gunaratne’s depiction as the youths are ‘caught in the same swirl’ of the ‘monstrous’ city (4), to the point that they never know whether violence originated within them or from ‘the road beneath [their] feet’ (2).

  • 3 A series of YA novels that focuses on the question of segregation in a dystopian world, leading to (...)

29As the narratives progress, these spaces come to be increasingly represented as militarised zones and the ‘state of exception’ that they represent becomes more prominent. ‘Marks of battle’ (26) are referenced in In Our Mad and Furious City. Meanwhile, in the first pages of Run, Riot, the presence of helicopters sets the tone for the events to follow. Taran also mentions that Anna was carrying a Marjorie Blackman book when they first met, perhaps an allusion to the Noughts and Crosses series.3 The imagery of Taran’s rap verses as ‘grenades’ then takes on a new meaning, particularly as the riot police disembark, described as a ‘phalanx’ (230), and a ‘mass of attacking shields’ (231), reminiscent of ‘faceless shadows’ (231) and ‘monsters’ (231).

30As mentioned earlier, the housing estate is depicted as a space of closed compartments and the situation degenerates in both novels to become one of life and death. Even Yusuf, who knows that the bridge near the estate is a ‘no-go’, is not offered any protection by his ‘road knowledge’ (26) when the situation becomes more incendiary. Similarly, the characters in Run, Riot encounter more and more impediments as they try to escape the building. Whether being physically blocked by gang members who have taken over certain floors of the building, to difficulties like broken elevators or being cut from any means of communication with family members, the characters become progressively reduced to their status as biological beings. They scrounge for food and attempt to sleep for a few minutes at a time hidden in a stranger’s apartment. Indeed, when Jamal and Hari’s troubles begin early in the novel, they hear the ‘scurry of creatures clambering over the mulch of old food’ (30) when they are near the underpass and just moments later, they start to ‘scurry’ (31) as well, hinting at the way that they become progressively dehumanised in the narrative that follows. When they are trapped in the building mere hours later, they hope to become invisible by moving stealthily through the labyrinthine corridors of Firestone House.

  • 4 A subtle criticism of the dominant narrative is made in Run, Riot, when two characters are asked to (...)

31Agamben notes that in a state of exception, along with the suspension of laws comes the disappearance of meaningful political action, though he underscores the impact that a generalised state of crisis can have in reinforcing exclusionary spaces. After events like the 2011 riots or in the wake of murmurs that martial law would need to be instigated using the Civil Contingencies Act feared from a no-deal Brexit, it is not surprising that urban violence is often associated with acts of riots or civil unrest. And yet, less attention is placed on the ways in which urban violence can originate from the state and other neoliberal forces. These novels thereby capture the way in which social exclusion can become a traumatic facet of everyday life by moving away from descriptions of council housing and youth delinquency favoured in the press.4 Instead, limited political agency is represented through different manifestations of visibility and invisibility in these novels. While this violence may be less sensationalist, it remains equally as detrimental to the urban fabric in that it gradually wears down the residents of these estates and renders them more vulnerable.

32For instance, the references to CCTV surveillance in Run, Riot are many. Early in the novel, Anna mentions that there is new CCTV ‘everywhere’ (45). Hari mentions the need to keep watch even during an innocent exchange with Sim: ‘He knows his body language is getting jittery, and he’s looking around for passers-by, for police, for CCTV cameras, for anything that might incriminate him’ (26). When Anna ends up in a police van at the end of the novel, she realises that they were being subjected to surveillance the entire time. Amongst many other references to state surveillance, new CCTV cameras are also installed around the Square in In Our Mad and Furious City. Indeed, similar mechanisms of discipline used to control the ‘delinquent’ are redeployed, particularly in Run, Riot and can certainly provoke comparisons with the methods of observation and control as described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. The housing estate comes to resemble a kind of technocratic ‘carceral network’ because all levels of society have been infiltrated by the very people meant to protect the residents of these areas.

33It is also important to note that surveillance goes beyond police presence in these works and deconstructs the fixed notions of who or what poses a danger. For instance, Yusuf explains that the new imam who has replaced his father has him under constant watch by members of his own mosque. He is stalked and inspected to ensure that he meets the requirements associated with community belonging. Lack of agency then takes on another form as he explains: ‘Our lives were not our own, that much was clear’ (26). Indeed, when he is amongst members of his religious community, he becomes ‘invisible’ and ‘unable to pull away’ (251). This contrasts with the description given of his time playing football in the Square when the ‘youngers . . . watch from the banisters’ and the ‘olders look down at us too as if up in the stands’ (64). In a similar vein, characters in Run, Riot are often intimidated by former friends turned gang members who use similar methods of observation and coercion against them, thus complicating conventional power structures associated with that of victim and perpetrator.

  • 5 While she examines an entirely other historical context, Régine Robin emphasises the way in which t (...)

34Finally, the concept of visibility (or lack thereof) manifests itself through the theme of gentrification. For Yusuf, gentrification destroys all that is familiar, replacing it with ‘new road signs and the plastered-over billboards, ads that sold dreams for other people’ (26). Similarly, the characters in Run, Riot almost miss the inane community art that has been removed.5 This erasure ultimately has the paradoxical effect of making youths from the estate hyper-visible. These limitations on the ability to move freely are pushed to the extreme in Run, Riot. As the characters attempt to escape the tower block, Taran mentions that even though they move cautiously, ‘every squelch the boys’ trainers make on the floor is like a deafening alarm. . . . The muffled dank-dank of her boots feels like a march of death’ (84). When considered within the broader context of gentrification, these scenes highlight how displaced former residents of newly gentrified areas become more visible as wealthier groups of individuals transform a space. By extension, they are increasingly affected by everyday surveillance just as the characters in Run, Riot are targeted by state institutions as well as the company leading the neighbourhood revitalisation development.

35While invisibility in Run, Riot seems to offer a form of temporary protection, Gunaratne’s novel culminates in the death of Yusuf, who is trampled during the riots. As Yusuf feels his ‘small life pass’ (274), the precariousness of life in the ‘ends’ comes full circle. This phrase echoes his words from the prologue when he describes how the ‘small futures’ of youths from the estate are too easily ‘snuffed’ out (1). The reader may also be struck by the word ‘mongrel’, which is featured in the prologue and as a section heading. Ultimately, Ardan’s dog, the actual mongrel, bears witness to Yusuf’s death, and it is startling for the reader because the dog is treated more humanely than Yusuf who is carelessly discarded. The figure of the non-white male as a dangerous alien is also reinforced by the term ‘mongrel’. As the authors of The Empire Strikes Back explain, whether immigrants were called ‘blacks, browns, darkies, nig-nigs, or Pakis’ (66), they are often perceived as outsiders—a threatening monolith diametrically opposed to those with so-called ‘pure’ identities. By examining visibility within these novels, another facet of the exclusionary space of the housing estate is thus revealed, in addition to the political and economic dynamics that reinforce the state of exception produced therein.

The Housing Estate as an Emancipatory Site

36In Le droit à la ville, Henri Lefebvre underscores that the complete urbanisation of society would result in the disintegration of the traditional city and produce a new form of segregation, affecting inhabitants ranging from students and workers to the middle class and intellectuals. As such, the housing estate represents a microcosm of the broader city in which aspects of bare life can be perceived. And yet, there is another underlying current in these novels that must be addressed. The housing estate is represented ambiguously, encapsulating both despondency and opportunity.

37When considering the housing estate as a space of prospect and one that can encourage the creative process, it is helpful to consider the impact of ‘hyper-local demarcation’ on urban residents. In Terraformed, Joy White outlines this concept as a means of analysing ‘how the interaction between people, legislation, policy, the built environment and the sonic landscape offers a glimpse into the power relations that support inequalities and create exclusionary spaces’ (45). White’s analysis is particularly useful in that while the housing estate is often one of marginalisation, it is also a site in which creativity can lead to ‘emancipatory disruption’ (42).

38Gunaratne and Shukla’s novels do shed light on the heterogeneity of the housing estate by juxtaposing aspects associated with precarity alongside positive social and creative experiences. While the space of the estate is poor, underfunded, neglected and cruel, the narratives are punctuated by moments of solace, specifically when parts of the estate are (re)appropriated to allow for brief glimpses into community life alongside creative practices that allow characters to reclaim different forms of agency whether that be through grassroots political action or artistic practices.

  • 6 Some of the shared collective rooftop moments described in Run, Riot are reminiscent of the rooftop (...)

39For instance, Taran often goes to the roof to gaze out over the estate. This is where she shares moments of comradery with her friends and also where she finds inspiration for her musical production6. However, although she appreciates some aspects of her building, she looks down and cannot help but notice that it is a ‘mess of grass and wasteland’ (23). In In our Mad and Furious City, the Estate is described by its broken windows and overflowing garbage. For Ardan, it remains a ‘drab and brokedown place’ though he also experiences conflictual feelings like Taran when he ‘looks at the Ends at night because the view of the West Block is as nice as it is dismal in the daytime’ (19). Still, he quickly remembers that the ‘road beauty’ captured by rappers fails to fully dissimulate that these spaces are ‘places of pain’ (20).

40Rap music often analyses and comments on the built environment and it is indeed through rap and grime that Taran and Ardan also develop agency. Both novels feature rap verses integrated into the narrative, which allow the reader to experience how a rapper can engage lyrically with rhyme, rhythm, imagery, precise vocabulary and complex structures in order to represent their reality. This is particularly striking when one considers that both novels mimic the speech patterns of young people from the estate, while also explicitly foregrounding the art of rap and grime. As Michael Eric Dyson notes: ‘At their best, rappers shape the tortuous twists of urban fate into lyrical elegies. They represent lives swallowed by too little love or opportunity. They represent themselves and their peers with aggrandizing anthems that boast of their ingenuity and luck in surviving’ (177).

41Not only do rap and grime allow Ardan and Taran the possibility of performing vulnerability alongside the opportunity and disenfranchisement represented by the estate, but these characters also come to fully inhabit and even actively rehabilitate the ‘non-places’ of the housing estate. Marc Augé notes the proliferation of non-places in this era of hypermodernity, an analysis that certainly complements the way in which Newham in Joy White’s analysis has been transformed by neoliberal practices. This encourages us to consider how spaces such as public transport, hallways, rooftops and other such sites become multi-use spaces and points for community gathering.

42For Ardan, the rooftop where he composes his music is transformed at the beginning of the novel because it provides a space where invisibility is a deliberate choice. It alters his condition as well as his perception of the estate, empowering him to write his lyrics. Ardan also notes that listening to Skepta’s music shifts his perception of the estate. He remarks: ‘Under Skepta’s clarity this place assumes a bashiness that makes the court come off like it’s a battle-dome. A place of ill-purpose, full of sketchy humour and distinction. Square played to meaning, ennet. Our meaning. My own.’ (59) This passage is striking because it shows the process through which space can be recouped, with the use of ‘our’ and ‘my’ accentuating this reappropriation.

43Ardan’s comment about Skepta foreshadows the way his rapping will allow him to influence and even come to dominate a space. Later in the novel, Ardan participates in a rap battle and as the ‘beat drops’ (168), the bus is also transformed from a non-place to one of ‘glory’ for Ardan (169). The integration of his verses in the narrative is reminiscent of what Jean-Jacques Lecercle stresses: ‘Words are endowed with force, with the performativity of desire. And the struggle is conducted not through language, but in language’ (236). The rap lyrics included in the novel not only mention the ‘North Block rooftop’ as the space that has allowed him to hone his craft, but the extended metaphor of his rap becoming weaponry is also noteworthy:

I do this because my rhymes are knives
My flows are veins and my lines are signs—to the future.
I freeze your face like Medusa . . .
My bars prove I’m top billing
Cuh’ for me to battle you is a fucking honour killing (168–169)

44Ardan’s transformative power over the bus is put on full display and represents an important moment in the narrative because he often mentions how he lacks the mastery of the estate as exhibited by Yusuf and especially by Selvon. This is epitomised by the allusion to Medusa in the verses, but also to the way in which his music allows him to shed his timidity and become ‘a balrog, a kraken, a chimera’ (170).

45In general, the presence of rap and grime in these novels not only reposition the characters from the margins to the centre of their own life stories, but by extension, the communities of which they are a part are also imbued with more value through these characters’ performing identities. The oscillation between moments of hope and futility offers insight into how the ‘tangle of fragile points on a map’ (Gunaratne 285) grants these characters the possibility of taking on new identities. In particular, female rap MC names are associated with the duality of strength and vulnerability. Taran’s stage name, Riot, exemplifies this trend as it is one of force associated with the impact she wishes to have on her community, but also serves as a tribute to her deceased father who used to tell her never to ‘run riot in [her] own home’ (11).

  • 7 Such moments of creative liberation are reminiscent of Angie ThomasThe Hate U Give, a popular YA (...)

46For Taran, the condition of invisibility is not only something inflicted upon her by the state. It is also a perceptual mode that allows her to become more sensitive to her surroundings and uncover unseen images or hidden connections in the city. Unsurprisingly, she wants to tell the story of a ‘time and place like Nas’s first album’ (15) in order to render the collective community more visible7. She comments:

You can hear every little noise in this building. You can hear iPhone alarms three floors down, kettles boiling, arguments, people coming home drunk or worse at all hours.
Yeah, and the guy who runs a sick Bollywood cinema out of his front room cos he’s got a sick Sonos. And the kids shouting out Stormzy lyrics as they scooter up and down the corridors.
That dull thud of kick drums from the flats that double as music studios.
The seventeen languages, forty different television programmes and five guffaws of laughter at any given point. (20)

47These scenes of cognitive mapping not only grant visibility to spaces that are usually ignored, but also shed light on the other residents of the estate. Scenes of communal spaces alongside others featuring sympathetic characters subvert the notion of the inner city and housing estate as nothing more than spaces of inherent brutality and mercilessness.

  • 8 As Erinn Gilson notes in The Ethics of Vulnerability, ‘Ontological vulnerability is an unavoidable (...)

48The importance attributed to music in these novels provides a new lens through which themes of invisibility and agency in the city can be examined. This approach can be complemented by the distinctions that Erinn Gilson draws between ‘ontological’ and ‘situational’ vulnerabilities when parsing the multiplicity of perspectives featured in these novels since vulnerability is represented as a non-dualistic facet of urban life in both narratives.8 This is conducive to readings that represent the challenges of the city alongside its potential to activate renewed perceptions in the reader as well. By positioning the city and the housing estate at the centre of our readings, the ways in which these authors write back and dispel hegemonic structures that impact the lives of young people in the inner cities is foregrounded.

Conclusion

49BAME literature often tends to be oversimplified by the literary and editorial establishment. In the wake of increasing instrumentalization of authors classified in this category, one cannot help but think of Salman Rushdie’s fitting observation in Imaginary Homelands:

The migrations of the fifties and sixties happened. ‘We are. We are here.’ And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage; which heritage includes both a Bradford-born Indian kid’s right to be treated as a full member of British society, and also the right of any member of this post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as all the world’s community of displaced writers has always done. (15)

  • 9 The dynamics at play that Stuart Hall examines in his reflection on the ‘return of ethnicity’ (92) (...)

50Rushdie’s anti-essentialist view of space provides a useful foundation when attempting to better appreciate the intergenerational relationships presented in both novels, an element that certainly merits more in-depth analysis. Nelson, in particular, muses on his son’s distinctive relationship to the city, while Taran and her twin brother also reflect on their loss of geographical bearings and attempt to reconcile their past with their new environment following their father’s illness and death9.

51Indeed, there is a strong sense that the new generation’s symbolic connection with the past is fading, or perhaps to put it more precisely, evolving. It is through this shift that the complex practices associated with identity-building in these novels are exhibited. As such, let us conclude this analysis by briefly touching on the paradigm shift experienced by the young adults in these novels in relation to what Dave Ellis refers to as the rise of ‘new parochialism’ in contemporary fiction. He notes that members of working-class London are developing new forms of identification that are increasingly tied to local spaces:

One consequence of this new parochialism is an alteration in the former codes of affiliation expressed through formal and family history and musical style which is supplemented (rather than replaced) by local histories, often held at the level of orality and myth. Central to the ‘new’ histories in each of the texts are myths of violence and reputation. In this respect, . . . the postcodes of the new parochialism blur the boundaries of “race” and introduce new affiliations and disaffiliations that pertain more to new local histories than to the histories of migration. (61)

52Unsurprisingly, characters in both novels accentuate their connection to the hyperlocal. As Yusuf states, ‘Place was our own. This place. Whether we heard the whispers of our older roots never mattered. What mattered for us was the present, terse and cold, where we would make our own coarse music’ (4). Immediacy in both time and space comes to dominate their respective worldviews, while they also balance individual conceptions of Britishness, often marked by multiple allegiances, heritages and trajectories.

53This literature should not be relegated merely to the status of a subcategory of postcolonial or diasporic literature. Instead, privileging new ways of thinking about these narratives can allow us to better grasp how contemporary writers are representing hidden and neglected parts of the city as a means of challenging perceptions of inner cities as one-dimensional spaces characterised by crime and violence. This article provides the first step in a broader project aimed at gaining a more comprehensive understanding of inner-city fictions and representations of youth identity in this burgeoning literary movement. A geocritical approach allows for readings based in the space of the housing estate while integrating concepts like ‘bare life’ and ‘hyper-local demarcation’ as parameters by which these novels can be examined. This will help not only to reposition this literature from the periphery to the centre but will also contribute to the growing impetus in the broader field of literary criticism that continues to renegotiate and call into question the usefulness of such binary frameworks in and of themselves.

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Bibliographie

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Augé, Marc, Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris: Seuil, 1992.

Bongie, Chris, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identity of Postcolonial Literature, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009.

Centre for contemporary cultural studies. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ’70s Britain, New York: Routledge, 1982.

Dyson, Michael Eric, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Ellis, Dave, ‘“Styles, Codes and Violence”: Subcultural Identities in Contemporary Black Writing of Britain’, Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media, eds. Nick Ë., Beth Johnson and Andrzej Zieleniec, Cham: Springer, 2018, 59–72.

Gilson, Erinn C., The Ethics of Vulnerability, New York: Routledge, 2014.

Gunaratne, Guy, In Our Mad and Furious City, London: Hachette, 2018.

Hall, Stuart, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017.

Hirsch, Afua, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, London: Vintage, 2018.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, The Violence of Language, New York: Routledge, 1990.

Mercer, Kobena, ‘“Diaspora Didn’t Happen in a Day”: Reflections on Aesthetics and Time’, ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana, Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars, 2007, 66–78.

Robin, Régine, Berlin chantiers: essai sur les passés fragiles, Paris: Stock, 2011.

Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta, 1991.

Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke UP, 2016.

Shukla, Nikesh, Run, Riot, London: Tinder, 2018.

Sollers, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

White, Joy, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, London: Repeater, 2020.

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Notes

1 Drawing on the work of Edouard Glissant, Chris Bongie argues that the postcolonial, in its relation to the colonial, is not ‘(simply) a matter of either/or but (also) of both/and’ (66). This also pertains to the relationship of the postmodern to the modern.

2 The term ‘BAME’ remains quite problematic. As Afua Hirsch aptly notes, ‘. . . British people have rushed to embrace BAME—an irritating acronym which is so broad as to be meaningless, encompassing as it does every single group that does not have white skin. I find it even more grating when turned into a word pronounced “bayme”—as a tool for avoidance. […] I do feel like a black person, and I identify with the phrase mixed race, but I will never wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and find a “bayme” woman staring back at me’ (104–105). Similar issues can be noted with the ‘own voices’ literary movement popularised in recent years, particularly in the domain of YA fiction.

3 A series of YA novels that focuses on the question of segregation in a dystopian world, leading to decades-long violence and civil unrest based on ethnic division.

4 A subtle criticism of the dominant narrative is made in Run, Riot, when two characters are asked to film an event with their phones. They reflect on their frequent depiction in media as nothing more than hoodlums while briefly becoming documentarians. This scene can be considered a form of writing back against what Christina Sharpe calls the instrumentalization of the ‘orthography of the wake.’

5 While she examines an entirely other historical context, Régine Robin emphasises the way in which the symbolic landscape from street names to statues form part of individual and collective identities and subject to constant struggle (200–201). Perhaps this explains even why unexceptional spatial markers can still evoke a sense of loss.

6 Some of the shared collective rooftop moments described in Run, Riot are reminiscent of the rooftop picnic in Kassovitz’s film La haine, which also happens to be referenced in In Our Mad and Furious City.

7 Such moments of creative liberation are reminiscent of Angie ThomasThe Hate U Give, a popular YA novel turned film, featuring a young female rapper struggling to find her voice.

8 As Erinn Gilson notes in The Ethics of Vulnerability, ‘Ontological vulnerability is an unavoidable receptivity, openness, and the ability to affect and be affected. Situational vulnerabilities are the specific forms that vulnerability takes in the social world of which we have a differential experience because we are differently situated’ (37). While Judith Butler’s definition of ‘precarity’ as a ‘politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (25) is certainly helpful to keep in mind, she explains that this state is also connected to a ‘condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appear to the very state from which they need protection.’ (26) This conflictual relationship with political and social institutions of the state reveals itself in much of the fraught dialogue interspersed throughout Run, Riot as the characters struggle with the spectre of indiscriminate violence and a kind of precariousness that changes depending on the space(s) they occupy. Nevertheless, precariousness is grounded in grief and loss. It remains a less malleable concept than that of vulnerability.

9 The dynamics at play that Stuart Hall examines in his reflection on the ‘return of ethnicity’ (92) can undoubtedly provide more insight into some of the differences in generational perspectives present in Gunaratne’s novel.

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Référence électronique

Rebecca Blanchard, « ‘We lived upon jagged teeth in the dark’: The Housing Estate in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City and Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 63 | 2022, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2022, consulté le 12 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/12882 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.12882

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Auteur

Rebecca Blanchard

Rebecca Blanchard is a Temporary Teaching and Research Associate (ATER) in the Department of English at the University of Tours. She completed her PhD in French Studies at the University of Toronto with a focus on contemporary literary representations of the banlieues in France. Her current research focuses on the representation of urban space, national identity, and belonging in contemporary British and French literature. She has published several articles on contemporary French fiction, including Kaoutar Harchi’s dystopian fiction and Thomté Ryam’s polyphonic novels.

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