Resettling the ‘urban colonies’
I’ve been at the Historical Materialism conference in London for the last few days, where I gave the following talk about racial capitalism and cultural production in the UK. Thank you to Jaz Blackwell-Pal for chairing, to my fellow panellists William Conroy and Kristin Ciupa, and to everyone who came to engage with what we had to say.
Resettling the ‘urban colonies’: cultural production and the crisis of the current racial regime
My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I want to suggest that, within contemporary global capitalism at least, coloniality is a much more variegated and conceptually unruly phenomenon than we might expect, given its important analytical separation into functional categories (such as mercantile, franchise and settler colonialism), historical processes and geohistorical specifics. Perhaps the simplest way to put this is to say that a study of western cultural production can teach us that coloniality offers a repertoire of racializing strategies that are continually drawn upon and reinvented in the service of sustaining relations of domination and exploitation, and that these processes may well seem to defy structural and historical logics. Secondly, I want to persuade you that the apparent contradiction between the hegemonic assumption that racial diversity is a social and cultural good and the increasing amplification in the UK, for example, of racist assertions of the existence of ‘no-go areas’ in cities like Birmingham or ‘Sadiq Khan’s London’ is not a contradiction at all. Rather, what we are seeing currently is a crisis of a racial regime that has articulated these tendencies together in the interests of white supremacy.
I will focus, here, on cultural representations of what Stuart Hall and the co-authors of Policing the Crisis called the ‘urban colonies’: the social terrain occupied by the discursive figure of ‘the mugger’, whose appearance in the field of culture they grasped as an opportunity to analyse the emergent politics of Thatcherism. But I’ll start with some theoretical considerations.
Racial Regimes
My argument is rooted in a negotiation between two positions that bear upon my wider project to analyse race as a system of power through sites both of its manifestation and critique in contemporary culture. The first is Fredric Jameson’s well-known dictum that ‘we cannot not periodise’. The second is Cedric Robinson’s observation that ‘the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events’, which often fails to account for what he calls ‘the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations’. ‘Increments of time contoured to abstract measure’, Robinson concludes, ‘rarely match the rhythms of human action’. [thank you to Kieron Turner for illuminating chats about this]
If race is – as Stuart Hall put it – a ‘changing same’, and not simply a constant feature of social relations, then it cannot not be periodised. We therefore face the analytical necessity to periodise the changes to racial order so as to account for the dependence of the continuity of race on its capacity to make alteration a feature of its reproduction. Furthermore, our account must ‘match the rhythms of human action’, which is to say that it must be rooted in social relations, and thus provide some kind of explanation of how racial order is made through a series of crucial alterations at crucial moments, and how it may be unmade by interventions guided by an analysis of the contradictions produced in this process.
Twenty-four years after Black Marxism, from which the observations I’ve quoted about periodisation are taken, Cedric Robinson published Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, a study of race in north American theatre and early film across the turn of the twentieth century. Its central analytical concept is the ‘racial regime’. These he defines as ‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power’.
Robinson’s use of this term is distinctive in two important ways. First his emphasis is always on a regime’s instability and capacity for fragmentation and reconstruction. He therefore concentrates primarily on the ‘chaotic’ production of successive racial regimes as ‘unstable truth systems’ or, a ‘makeshift patchwork [‘stitched together from remnants of its predecessors and new cloth’] masquerading as memory and the immutable’.
Secondly, these regimes are always, for Robinson, ‘necessarily articulated with accruals of power’, tacitly citing the idea developed principally by Louis Althusser that the contingent unity of a historical moment is formed by ‘articulations’. These are glossed by Hall as ‘relations of linkage and effectivity’ that form ‘a “complex structure”’, whose parts are related, though not because ‘each is reducible to the other’ or because they ‘have exactly the same conditions of existence’, but ‘as much through their differences as through their similarities’. Hall’s commentary serves equally as a clarification of Robinson’s sketch of the concept of a racial regime, directing us to linkages between race and power that need not be overt or direct and may even be characterised primarily by difference. In spite of this, racial regimes are always incompatible with ‘social relations’, which they unavoidably misrepresent in their construction of racialized justifications for them.
In both of these respects, Robinson’s ‘racial regimes’ fundamentally represent a way of thinking race conjuncturally. I use that term in the sense developed by Stuart Hall from Gramsci to theorise the present as ‘the product of “many determinations”’, defined, in part, by ‘related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different tempos’. The conjuncture, then, is the form taken by the ‘condensation’ of these dynamics ‘in any particular historical moment’. The racial regime offers a conjunctural conception of racism, in that it seeks to identify the temporary fusion of both long and short-term social, political and cultural dynamics to form the racialized terrain of the present.
Crucially, in spite of Hall’s commitment to the capacity and responsibility of analysis to reveal the ‘determinations’ of a conjuncture, the present is also always, crucially in his assessment, ‘an open horizon, fundamentally unresolved, and in that sense open to the play of contingency’. Once again, Robinson’s account of race shares this commitment: he conceives of it as ‘an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known and unimagined fractures of cultural forms’.
Both Robinson’s purpose and mine here, however, is far from merely assaying the alchemical substance of a racial regime to determine its contents and their proportions. Rather, it is to guide the process of dismantling such regimes by subjecting their ‘masquerades’ to historical and social analysis. Robinson wrote that ‘a discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime’, as are ‘its social relations’, because ‘one threatens [its] authority and the other saps [its] vitality’.
And so, in the quest to threaten the authority of and sap the vitality from our current racial regime, we pass from theory to history and social relations.
The ‘urban colonies’
Stuart Hall first identified the symptoms of what he later referred to as the ‘neoliberal revolution’ in his co-authored 1978 book, Policing the Crisis. This used the then-novel figure of the ‘mugger’ as something like a Lacanian ‘quilting point’, through which it unravelled an analysis of the stitching together of the various levels of the emergent social formation of Thatcherism. The social terrains of the ‘mugger’, Hall and his co-authors write, are the ‘urban colonies’, sites of racialized crisis, of which ‘black crime’ was made a ‘signifier’. These are ‘internal colonies’, in the sense most famously advanced by Black radicals in the US during the 1960s, where Black people are maintained as surplus populations.
Lord Scarman holding his report into the ‘Brixton Disorders’
The ‘mugger’ made a crucial appearance, three years later, in media reports of the Brixton Uprising of 1981, as that urban colony broke into open rebellion against the combination of racist, colonial policing; the predations of capital, and the erosion of state-provided social safety nets. Reporting on the uprising, Lord Scarman wrote that ‘institutional racism does not exist in Britain; but racial disadvantage and its nasty associate, racial discrimination, have not yet been eliminated’. Scarman’s refusal to countenance ‘the allegation that the police are the oppressive arm of a racist state’ was, however, offset by an apparently well-intentioned focus on what he called the ‘social conditions which create a disposition towards violent protest’. Nonetheless, Scarman explicitly stated that social conditions should not be considered ‘a cause of the disorders’, leaving a crucial explanatory gap between the socially conditioned ‘dispositions’ of Black people in Brixton and their actions. Sivanandan’s analysis of Scarman’s report grasped the carefully constructed implication of an ‘inherent disability’ within the Black community here. This encouraged readers to make a racist leap across Scarman’s explanatory gap, and develop what Sivanandan called a ‘socio-psychological view of racism’, whereby family structures and social habits allegedly endemic to Brixton’s ‘West Indian’ community, when combined with social deprivation, produce both allegations of institutional racism and violent outrages.
The alternative to Scarman’s assertion of the racial regime would be to enquire into the material underpinnings of the social relations that it seeks to justify. Here, the regulation school of neo-Marxist economists offers a compelling means of clarifying the historical and social processes that produced and sustained the ‘urban colonies’, namely the concept of a ‘regime of accumulation’. This is a negotiated balance between capital, labour and the state, constituted by a set of institutional arrangements, habitual norms, legal provisions, organisational structures, and so on, which secure the accumulation of capital in any given historical moment.
The regime of accumulation that produced the urban colonies was, of course, that imposed by the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s, which was marked by deindustrialisation, privatisation, and thus the rise of investment and rentier capital, and the erosion of social provisions, by which – as Robbie Shilliam has argued – an ideal ‘orderly independent’ subject was produced. That subject was – of course – a racialized figure, but not always an overtly racist one, as the Conservatives’ famous 1983 election adverts show.
Election advert from 1983 depicting a young man in a suit, with the slogan ‘Labour says he’s Black. Tories say he’s British.’
As the neoliberal project progressed, it passed – of course – into the hands of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘progressives’ (scare quotes around that term), who oversaw a very gradual but nonetheless marked project of increased racial diversity, driven at least as much by what Stuart Hall termed ‘multicultural drift’ as any antiracist objectives.
The common critique of this project to racially diversify cultural production of all kinds is that the inclusion it produces is always conditional, creating something like a comprador class of the racially-minoritised bourgeois or PMC (whose interests also tend to align with those of white capital). This is true as far as it goes, but – to take an example from my home discipline of theatre – the output of Black-led theatre companies in the 1990s was by no means included in the white theatre of subsequent years. In fact, those plays were excluded even from the repertoires of the companies that had previously produced them. What happened, in fact, was that racially minoritised people were (very gradually) incorporated into white cultural production. These terms – incorporation and exclusion – are twinned in the term ‘incorporative exclusion’, developed by Fred Moten from Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir’s critique of Israel’s ‘inclusive exclusion’ of Palestinians in the occupied territories whose labour was crucial to Israel’s economy, but who were spatially and legally separated from Israeli society. Under incorporative exclusion, racially minoritized people are incorporated into an institutional system in order to reproduce their structural, perhaps even ontological, exclusion from it. I term the racial regime so produced the ‘long white nineties’.
Kwame Kwei-Armah and Shaun Parkes in Elmina’s Kitchen, National Theatre 2003
In this context, it’s striking that the revival of Black theatre in the long, white nineties was marked by a play and television film that echoed closely the ‘socio-psychological’ account of racism propagated by Scarman, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen. Its representation of failed masculinities and immanent propensities to violence are straight out of Scarman. Its 2005 television screening, between the killing of Azelle Rodney and the finding by a public inquiry that police officer Anthony Long had ‘no lawful justification’ for firing 8 shots at Rodney after a ‘hard stop’ of the vehicle in which he was a passenger offered a bleakly prescient picture of the racial counterinsurgency that created the conditions to ensure that Long would be cleared of murder in 2016.
In the mid-2010s, however, the racial regime of the long white nineties began to come under increasingly intense pressure, so that major cultural producers were pressured by activist artists and cultural workers to commit to more stringent targets for racial diversity. When we examine the cultural commodities produced under subsequent diversity initiatives, it bears remembering that race is a project that has always drawn deeply on western aesthetics. Theories of drama developed during the advent of colonial modernity in the 16th century focused centrally on Aristotle’s dramaturgical categories of time, place and action, and insisting – beyond Aristotle’s prescriptions – on their ‘unity’. A brief analysis of the positioning of racially minoritized people within mainstream cultural production reveals the frequency with which they are spatially located at a distance from the UK: in the USA, the Caribbean, India, South Africa, and so on. They are also overwhelmingly located in the past, often the mid-twentieth century, although sometimes they are also consigned to the future. Ncuti Gatwa’s debut as Dr Who, for example, was marked by the unprecedented refusal of the previous incarnation of the doctor to vanish, leaving him in the Fanonian position of only being able to exist in relation to his white forebear.
David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa as Dr Who
This discursive exclusion of people of colour from the here and now of contemporary Britain is commonly exacerbated by their association with destructive action. Again and again, we see violence represented as though it has been unleashed from Black and Brown characters who, it is implied, have always harboured it. We see this in representations of the eruption of repressed tribal customs, or anti-colonial vengeance, or the insatiable bitterness of ambition thwarted by institutional racism. People of colour have, thus, been routinely peripheralized and monstered by the process of incorporation, required to present their own racialized existence within the social order of whiteness.
Still from bodycam footage of the ‘hard stop’ in which Chris Kaba was shot by Martyn Blake.
At the same time, we have once again seen a police officer, Martyn Blake, cleared of the murder of an unarmed Black man, Chris Kaba, whom he shot at close range during a ‘hard stop’ in 2022. More than that, the period following the verdict has been characterised by media depictions of Kaba as inherently violent because of his alleged criminal activity, and dangerous simply because he was driving a car when stopped, and thus culpable for his own extra-judicial killing. Martyn Blake, meanwhile, has joined the ranks of the heroes of copaganda.
‘Resettling’
Representations of Kaba have fitted the pattern established by ‘the mugger’, he has been joined the urban colonies of our racial regime by further folk devils, in particular the ‘terrorist’ and ‘migrant’, often racialized as Muslim as well as/instead of Black. Simultaneously, we have seen the shameless co-option of antiracist discourse to the service of projects of racial domination, most pointedly in the case of the amplification of Zionism’s racialized construction of the ‘antisemite’ since the start of the second intifada. We can, of course, point to significant cultural critiques of the histories and social relations that have characterised race as a technology of power. In the British theatre, we might think of debbie tucker green’s ear for eye, which was also filmed for television, or Dave Harris’ Tambo and Bones; in the visual arts Lubaina Himid’s paintings on copies of the Guardian to critique its representations of blackness or Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell, and of course his Small Axe television films.
But, in this final case, we also saw the notable excision of the Caribbean from these stories of the Black Caribbean diaspora, and once again the temporal exclusion of antiracist struggle from the present. In these ways, McQueen’s films represented a significant compromise with the intensification of incorporative exclusion in contemporary culture during the transition to what Jeremy Gilbert has recently argued is a new regime of accumulation he names platform capitalism. This is characterised by the widespread mediation of socio-economic life by digital platforms, whose owners are able to accumulate vast amounts of capital, primarily in the form of rents and investment income. The weakness of labour under this regime is obvious: where profits from production are no longer crucial to capital accumulation, the capacity of labour significantly to influence the regulation of capital declines. Likewise, vestiges of the social democratic state have been all but obliterated by the process Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms ‘organised abandonment’. All of this points to the expansion of surplus populations and the generalization of the underclass conditions into more prosperous groups. Add to that the near-term consequences of climate change, wars and genocide, and it would be foolish not to predict – given the clear direction of cultural production over the last forty years – a racial regime whose overwhelmingly white but also importantly multi-ethnic beneficiaries seek to justify their power by racializing distinctions produced from the scraps of colonial repertoires.
Rioters attack a hotel housing migrants in Rotherham, UK, August 2024
The origins of the concept of ‘incorporative exclusion’ in settler colonies such as Israel and the United States may seem not to fit the UK as a former colonial metropole. Why would it be characterised by settler logics? I want to close by addressing this question with the observation that the period since the mid-2010s that I’ve identified as the crisis of the racial regime of the long white nineties has also seen what look a great deal like settler incursions into the ‘urban colonies’. Immigration enforcement vans, the hostile environment, the hoax ‘Trojan horse letter’ that functioned as a pretext for breaking up Muslim-run schools, stop-and-search, the Prevent strategy and wider counter-terrorism legislation, racist rioting and even, this summer, attempted anti-migrant and anti-Muslim pogroms. Our emergent racial regime seems, in these respects, qualitatively to reflect the West Bank. The urban colonies, in other words, have increasingly become internal settler colonies as state and non-state fascist actors are articulated together in a new regime. In short, race is alive, thriving and mutating, and the direction of travel of the urban colonies strongly suggests that the eradicationist logics of settler colonialism are crucial to understanding where it is headed.
