Alexander Beaumont

Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement

Established approaches to contemporary British literature frequently focus on how novelists from the UK have engaged with the complex account of culture that was developed on the Left during the 1980s as a response to Thatcherism. Freedom and the City shifts the terms of this debate in a new direction by using the thought of Hannah Arendt to reappraise the relationship between culture, Left politics and the British novel in the contemporary period, and to reveal a previously unstudied political and narrative logic I term the “cultural politics of disenfranchisement”. This logic grew out of a model of freedom advanced by leftist cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy during the 1980s and early 1990s, which identified urban subcultures as a substitute for the formal freedom associated with established political structures. Through close readings of six contemporary authors—Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Maggie Gee—I uncover the process by which British writers working after Thatcher came to believe that one of the consequences of this experiment with freedom has been a disastrous abandonment of politics in its formal sense: as a clearly delimited and agonistic public space in which a plurality of subjects is recognised and their actions invested with political meaning. Because of this abandonment, I argue, in less than two decades the coexistence of flexible cultural identities and urban space has become a virtual narrative impossibility: today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quietism.

Placing Politics: Home and the Right to Habitation in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Zadie Smith’s NW

In April 2013, four decades after Robin Hood Gardens welcomed its first residents, the process of removing the concrete housing complex began in Poplar, East London. The proposal to demolish had been controversial: Robin Hood Gardens was a landmark brutalist building designed by Alison and Peter Smithson that housed a heterogeneous community of some of the capital’s poorest residents, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century it was in a state of significant disrepair. On one side of the debate were those like Stephen Oliver, Bishop of Stepney, who in a letter to Andy Burnham — then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport — decried the complex as a ‘massively bad place to live’ and argued that ‘it would be […] a social disaster to preserve these buildings at the cost of much needed and long-term regeneration’ (personal communication, 16 March 2009). On the other side were those such as the editorial staff of the periodical Building Design, who considered Robin Hood Gardens to be an architectural masterpiece that was eminently capable of being refurbished and retained. Along with the Twentieth Century Society, a conservationist organisation that campaigns for the recognition of architecture in Britain since 1914, Building Design lobbied to establish a case for granting the complex protected status, eliciting endorsements from high-profile architects such as Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. However, this coalition of significant figures from the architectural establishment was defeated when Burnham issued the verdict that ‘on balance, Robin Hood Gardens was not successful housing and consequently not a particularly good example of housing design’ (cited in Hurst 2009: n.p.). Four years after this judgement was issued, the Smithsons’ housing complex was torn down.

Resistance and Rationalisation: Exile and the Inner Cities in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

This book is about fiction published in Britain, concerns itself mostly with the representation of London and interrogates the way in which a Jamaican (Hall) and an Englishman (Gilroy), building on the legacy of a Welshman (Williams), challenged existing categories of British — but more specifically English — cultural identity. It begins in none of these places, however, and it is doubtful whether any of the figures just named would straightforwardly embrace the identities I have ascribed to them: Williams’s place of birth in the Welsh borderlands is indicative of the circumspect way in which the work of all engages with the contingent question of nationality. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that this book begins elsewhere, in Venice, which since at least the Romantic period has functioned as an imaginary site where varied and often competing versions of Englishness have been developed, refined and repudiated. The Italian city-state on the shores of the Adriatic has also frequently served as the backdrop for interrogations of the self, and is a common setting for narratives of death, desire and psychological dissolution in English literature. Soon after arriving in the city in 1816, Lord Byron wrote in a letter to the poet Thomas Moore that he considered it to be ‘the greenest island’ of his imagination because its ‘evident decay’ was in keeping with his own personality, which had been ‘familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation’ (1982: 136).

Introduction: ‘What We Need Now…’

This book examines the visions of urban space produced across a range of contemporary British fiction in order to evaluate the legacy of British cultural studies in the field of literary production between 1987 and the mid-2010s. Previous approaches to this relationship have celebrated as politically progressive the resonances between, on the one hand, novels by contemporary British authors such as Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith and, on the other, the fluid account of subjectivity imagined by thinkers associated with cultural studies such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. By placing the relationship between freedom and the city at the centre of its analysis, this book demonstrates instead that both groups came to share a vision of social transformation that, paradoxically, led to a foreclosure of the space of politics itself. By drawing on the thinking of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the novels examined in this book become trapped in a failed literary and political logic that I term ‘the cultural politics of disenfranchisement’. This logic grew out of a project of radical reinvention initiated by left culturalist thinkers such as Hall and Gilroy over the course of the 1980s in response to the challenge posed by the realignment of the political right. And it took the form of what Aihwa Ong might describe as an ‘experiment with freedom’ (Ong 2006), in which urban subcultures were identified as a substitute for the formal freedom associated with established political structures such as voting, unionism, cooperativism, activism and the broad exercise of the democratic right to be heard.

Rave to the Grave: Hanif Kureishi and the Failure of Left Culturalism

On 26 August 1991, the most ostentatious contribution to the London skyline in nearly 30 years was officially opened by Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. Looming more than 240 metres above the capital, One Canada Square was the culmination of a decade-long process of development beginning with the closure of the West India Dock in 1980. Designed by Cesar Pelli, an architect well known for advocating the aesthetic virtues of postmodernism, and intended to service the explosion of financial services that had followed the deregulation of the City of London in 1986, the tower’s visual pastiche of Big Ben was fitting for a building that symbolised Thatcherism’s political investment in the role of free markets in rationalising urban space. It might therefore be considered a pity that Thatcher was no longer around to witness its opening in an official capacity. Ten months earlier, she had been ejected from office by a cabinet that, in light of the controversy surrounding the introduction of the Community Charge (commonly known as the Poll Tax), increasingly saw her as an unacceptably autocratic leader, as well as an electoral liability. Yet while Thatcher’s exit might have inspired the left to rejoice, the docklands’ redevelopment was a clear indication that the legacy of her three governments between 1979 and 1990 would remain a prominent part of the UK’s political landscape for a long time to come.

The New Culture Wars: Neo/liberal Pedagogy in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

On 24 June 2007, the rock group Bon Jovi staged a concert at a music venue in Greenwich, East London, that had cost a combination of state and private funders around £800 million to develop over the course of 14 years. This was the newly opened O2, which in an earlier incarnation as the Millennium Dome had formed the centrepiece of the UK’s celebrations for the year 2000. The building was designed by the architectural practice of Richard Rogers, whose ‘high-tech’ aesthetic had become well established since his early work on the Centre Pompidou in Paris (completed 1977) and the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London (1984). The Dome was delivered to a relatively modest budget of £43 million and completed on time in 1997, the year in which the Labour Party entered office for the first time in 18 years. By the end of 2001, however, it had become widely associated with financial mismanagement and represented a scar on the face of New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ ideology, which sought to recalibrate the heritage agenda of the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997 by offering up for domestic and international consumption the more urban and contemporary aspects of UK culture. The lacklustre exhibits beneath the Dome’s canvas roof were cheapened by aggressively signalled sponsorship arrangements, and while the government-owned New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), which administered the project between 1997 and 2001, anticipated that it would attract 12 million paying visitors in the first year, the actual figure ended up closer to 5.5 million (National Audit Office 2002: 1).

Politics Is Over: Flexibility and Freedom in J.G. Ballard’s Late Dystopias

In principle, the Trafford Centre, opened on 10 September 1998 in Dumplington, Greater Manchester, is the same as any other suburban megamall developed during the last 30 years. It offers two floors of flexible retail space as well as a food court containing stalls and restaurant chains, a large cinema and other forms of nighttime entertainment such as ten pin bowling. Instead of the utilitarian aesthetic typically associated with such shopping centres, however, the architects - London practice Chapman Taylor and Manchester-based Leach Rhodes Walker—were encouraged by their client, Peel Holdings, to design an ostentatious building that would represent as much of an attraction to shoppers as the retailers it housed. The result is a phantasmagoria of postmodern excess. The enormous food hall is designed to look like a cruise ship and features a pool, a catwalk and a ceiling spangled with starlight. There are dolphin-shaped water fountains spitting water 10 metres into the air, watched over by statues of bare-breasted mermaids. Visitors move between floors on dramatically curved staircases featuring thick, golden handrails, and Arcadian paintings and countless faux- marble columns constructed from medium-density fibreboard overlook the sweeping parades. Yet while it may be architecturally distinct from the usual out-of-town shopping experience, the Trafford Centre actually embodies the latter’s apotheosis.

Coda: The Postcultural City and the Postculturalist Left

In 2006 Lawrence Grossberg, the figure who played the most significant role in introducing the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the USA, published an essay entitled ‘Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? Should It?’ (Grossberg 2006). The essay took stock of a discipline that appeared to be experiencing a crisis not of political and epistemological legitimacy, but simply of relevance. ‘How did cultural studies get so f****** boring?’ Grossberg asks (8), explaining in a footnote that ‘[w]hat I mean by boring is: politically irrelevant, oversimplified, built on intellectual and political guarantees, [and] lacking the unique articulation of theoretical and empirical work that […] cut[s] into the concrete complexities of the conjuncture’ (28). Over the course of the essay he argues that ‘culture is no longer the unique and uniquely important site of subjectification and identification’ that it once seemed (22), no longer the place ‘where change is being organized and experienced’ most visibly, or most effectively (17). Instead, he is ‘tempted to say that the significant locus of the constitution and experience of change is moving into the realms of politics and economics’ (18). And while he stresses that ‘[t]his need not be taken to mean that culture does not matter’ any more, he does wonder whether it is necessary to develop ‘a post-cultural (or at least, a post-culturalist) cultural studies’ if the discipline is to ‘understand the theoretical challenges facing [it] in the contemporary conjuncture’ (24).