Reading the Riots: Precarity, Racial Injustice and Rights in the Novels of Alex Wheatle

Abstract

In view of Stuart Hall’s challenge issued in the wake of the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots, this essay aims to locate issues of precarity, racial injustice and rights in Alex Wheatle’s East of Acre Lane (2001) and The Dirty South (2008). Set on council estates in urban areas of London in 1981 and the early 2000s, respectively, these two novels represent and respond to continual legacies of colonialism and globalization — such as unemployment, institutional racism and excessive stop-and-search methods — that face many young black people in Britain today and that, in many ways, resulted in the riots that took place across Britain in August 2011. My investigation of these two novels is framed by two sets of ‘events’ that are interconnected through questions of precarity, racial injustice and black and minority ethnic rights: first, the series of riots that occurred in the early 1980s — such as the 1981 riots in Brixton as represented in East of Acre Lane — and second, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police in August 2011 and the subsequent riots in London and across Britain. Following Bhattacharyya’s argument that ‘the days of rioting are not, in themselves, the events that merit analysis and scrutiny’ (183), my reading of ‘riots’ in this essay extends to rioting as a symptom of and response to certain social and historical conditions as portrayed in Wheatle’s The Dirty South.

One of the dimensions which is constantly missing from the debates about social deprivation and disadvantage in the black population is any real sense of what it constitutes as the lived reality of those who experience it. Disadvantage and deprivation are general terms. They describe general social and economic processes, but it is quite difficult to try to imagine what it is like to experience the results of a set of social processes. (italics in original; Hall, ‘Urban Unrest’ 46)