Challenging Dominant Discourses of Risk and Crisis: Verbatim Drama and the 2011 British Riots

Drawing on multiple interconnected approaches, but privileging a cultural studies and postcolonial perspective, this paper investigates cultural imaginaries and literary and political narratives of the current financial crisis with a special emphasis on racialized constructions of the London riots of August 2011, as represented in the statements of politicians and media discourse. Building on recent scholarship, such as, among others, Mahony and Clarke (2012), Grossberg (2010), and Crosthwaite (2011), I shall analyse the phenomenology and causes of the riots in an attempt to make meaning of what Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey (2013: 55) have recently defined a “conjuncture”, “a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society and have given it a specific and distinctive shape come together, producing a crisis of some kind”. Building on the verbatim play The Riots (2011), by the South African novelist and playwright Gillian Slovo, this paper explores also the way in which, although through violent, confused and contradictory means, the London rioters aligned themselves with wider communities of consumption and desire. Looting brought to the fore the inconsistencies and fissures of the ruling neo-liberal paradigm and its model of citizenship based on individualism, competition and consumption. The rioters’ bid for branded goods staged the enduring injustices of a system unable (and/or unwilling) to answer questions of poverty, exclusion and marginalization, and showed the intrinsic contradictions of an ideological and socio-economic mindset promoting affluence while increasing poverty.