Postcolonial hauntings in riverine London: conviviality and melancholia

ABSTRACT

In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia—a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige—and conviviality—the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city—as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is this more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them, upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, the structure of feeling includes two elements in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings; and a fragile emergent form of convivial coexistence that finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. Gidley’s article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the southern shore and with Barking on the northern shore of the Thames.

KEYWORDS:

• affective geography
• conviviality
• landscapes of belonging
• postcolonial
• postcolonial melancholy
• structures of feeling

Notes

1 Les Back, ‘Researching community and its moral projects’, Twenty-First Century Society, vol. 4, no. 2, 2009, 201–14.

2 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977).

3 Steve Vertovec, ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2007, 1024–54. See also Mette Louise Berg and Nando Sigona, ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’, in Mette Louise Berg, Ben Gidley and Nando Sigona (eds), Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space (London and New York: Routledge 2015), 1–10; Mette Louise Berg, Ben Gidley and Anna Krausova, ‘Welfare micropublics and inequality: urban super-diversity in a time of austerity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 42, no. 15, 2019, 2723–42; Ben Gidley, ‘Failing better at convivially researching spaces of diversity’, in Mette Louise Berg and Magdalena Nowicka (eds), Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture: Convivial Tools for Research and Practice (London: UCL Press 2019), 123–40; Steven Vertovec, Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity (London: Routledge 2022).

4 Berg and Sigona, ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’, passim.

5 Susanne Wessendorf, ‘Commonplace diversity and the “ethos of mixing”: perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood’, in Berg, Gidley and Sigona (eds), Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space, 60–75.

6 Gill Valentine, ‘Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, 2008, 323–37.

7 Claire Alexander, Raminder Kaur and Brett St Louis, ‘Identities: new directions in uncertain times’, Identities, vol. 19, no. 1, 2012, 1–7; Les Back, ‘Losing culture or finding superdiversity?’, Discover Society, no. 20, 5 May 2015; Luke de Noronha, ‘The conviviality of the overpoliced, detained and expelled: refusing race and salvaging the human at the borders of Britain’, Sociological Review, vol. 70, no. 1, 2022, 159–77.

8 Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives (London: UCL Press 1996).

9 Ferruccio Pastore and Irene Ponzo, ‘Introduction’, in Ferruccio Pastore and Irene Ponzo (eds), Inter-group Relations and Migrant Integration in European Cities: Changing Neighbourhoods (Cham: Springer 2016), 1–18.

10 Michael J. Keith, ‘Between being and becoming? Rights, responsibilities and the politics of multiculture in the new East End’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 13, no. 5, 2008, 68–76, ¶2.4.

11 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press 2005), 98.

12 Paul Gilroy, ‘Why Harry’s disoriented about empire’, Guardian, 18 January 2005.

13 Paul Gilroy, ‘Multiculture in times of war: an inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006, 27–45. For an important critique of the concept, see Ruth Sheldon, ‘The avoidance of love? Rubbing shoulders in the secular city’, in Ben Gidley and Samuel Sami Everett (eds), Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2022), 211–30.

14 For example, Jan Blommaert, ‘Infrastructures of superdiversity: conviviality and language in an Antwerp neighborhood’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2014, 431–51.

15 Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Conviviality and multiculture: a post-integration sociology of multi-ethnic integration’, YOUNG, vol. 24, no. 3, 2016, 204–21 (207).

16 Magdalena Nowicka and Steven Vertovec, ‘Comparing convivialities: dreams and realities of living-with-difference’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2014, 341–56 (347).

17 Amit Singh, ‘“Carnal conviviality” and the end of race?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023, doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2023.2234013.

18 1899 Baedeker guide to London quoted in David Gilbert and Felix Driver, ‘Capital and empire: geographies of imperial London’, GeoJournal, vol. 51, no. 1/2, 2000, 23–32 (30).

19 Wemyss uses the term ‘Invisible Empire’ to name the unremarked but ubiquitous presence of imperial history in East London, in Georgie Wemyss, The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

20 The older interviewees mentioned in this article could recall when there were facilities on the Deptford riverside, for example, marked as interdicted to Lascars.

21 Ben Gidley, The Proletarian Other: Charles Booth and the Politics of Representation (London: Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College 2000); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago 1992).

22 Gail Lewis, ‘Animating hatreds: research encounters, organisational secrets, emotional truths’, in Roísín Ryan-Flood and Ros Gill (eds), Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections (London and New York: Routledge 2010), 211–27 (225); Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions (London and New York: Zed Books 2000).

23 Sandra Wallman, The Diversity of Diversity: Implications of the Form and Process of Localised Urban Systems, FEEM Working Paper KNOW 76.2003 (Milan: Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei 2005), available at https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/NDL2003-076.pdf (viewed 28 November 2023). Wallman’s open system resonates with Sennett’s description of the open city discussed in Elisabeth Becker’s contribution to this volume; see Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for a City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018).

24 Ole Jensen, ‘Your ghetto, my comfort zone; a life story analysis of inter-generational housing outcomes and residential geographies in urban south-east England’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 20, no. 4, 2013, 438-54.

25 Gillian Evans, Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006).

26 Gilbert and Driver, ‘Capital and empire’, 30.

27 Shirin Hirsch, In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2019), 2.

28 Shirin Hirsch, ‘From Powell to Casey: the mythical white working class’, Discover Society, no. 41, 1 February 2017. See also Liz Fekete’s interview with the late dockworker and activist Mickey Fenn that describes the context of the pro-Powell action and the ways that far-right views were contested by other dockworkers in the period: Liz Fekete, ‘Dockers against racism: an interview with Micky Fenn’, Race & Class, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, 55–60.

29 Unfunded project with Alison Rooke.

30 Unfunded project with Simon Rowe and Francesca Sanlorenzo. See also Ben Gidley, ‘Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life: researching everyday multiculture in an inner city estate’, in Berg, Gidley and Sigona (eds), Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space, 14–29.

31 Project funded by the European Integration Fund, led by Ferruccio Pastore, with London fieldwork conducted by Ben Gidley and Ole Jensen. See Ole Jensen, Hiranthi Jayaweera and Ben Gidley, Diversity, Cohesion and Change in Two South London Neighbourhood (Oxford: COMPAS 2012); Ole Jensen and Ben Gidley, ‘“They’ve got their wine bars, we’ve got our pubs”: housing, diversity and community in two South London neighbourhoods’, in Pastore and Ponzo (eds), Inter-group Relations and Migrant Integration in European Cities, 19–38; Ole Jensen, ‘Superdiversity in the post-industrial city: a comparative analysis of backlash narratives in six European neighbourhoods’, Policy & Politics, vol. 45, no. 4, 2017, 643–60.

32 Ben Gidley, ‘Speaking of the working class’, in Bridget Anderson and Vanessa Hughes (eds), Citizenship and Its Others (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), 177-183.

33 Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (London: Profile Books 2006); David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: C. Hurst 2017).

34 Back, ‘Researching community and its moral projects’.

35 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. Crucially, these narratives erase the demographic churn and diversity that have long existed in riverine London. As James notes of a similar context, ‘The memory of East London is whitened through forms of loss associated with non-white immigration’: Malcolm James, ‘Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, 652–67 (656).

36 Keith, ‘Between being and becoming?’, ¶2.4.

37 Gidley, ‘Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life’.

38 See Gidley, ‘Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life’.

39 Gillian Evans, 'Common Ground', Guardian, 4 October 2006.

40 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London and New York: Verso 1979), 159.

41 Back, ‘Researching community and its moral projects’, 203. See also James, ‘Whiteness and loss in outer East London’.

42 Ole Jensen, ‘A snapshot of urban dynamics’, COMPAS blog, 17 January, 2012. Available at: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2012/a-snapshot-of-urban-dynamics/ (viewed 8 December, 2023).

43 Sara Ahmed, ‘The Organisation of Hate’, Law and Critique, no. 12, 2001, 345–365 (346).

44 Ibid., 349.

45 Back, ‘Researching community and its moral projects’, 203.

46 Keith, ‘Between being and becoming?’, ¶2.4.

47 Alex Rhys-Taylor, ‘The essences of multiculture: a sensory exploration of an inner-city street market’, in Berg, Gidley and Sigona (eds), Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space, 46–59 (52).

48 On conviviality as a non-elite practice of the thrown-together, see Ben Rogaly, Stories from a Migrant City: Living and Working Together in the Shadow of Brexit (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2020); and Singh, ‘Carnal conviviality’.

49 Sennett, Building and Dwelling. See, in this volume, Elisabeth Becker, ‘Enlivening the “open city”: from a politics of divisibility to the making of Muslim cityzens in Berlin’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 57, no. 1–2, 2023, xx–xx.

50 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London and New York: Verso 1980), 130.

51 Williams, Politics and Letters, 168.

52 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 130.

53 Josh Dickins, ‘Unarticulated pre-emergence: Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling’, Constellations, 28 November 2011.

54 See, for example, de Noronha, ‘The conviviality of the overpoliced, detained and expelled’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Gidley

Ben Gidley is Reader in Sociology and Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent co-edited books are Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (with Sami Everett, Brill 2022) and Antisemitism and Antisemitism in Europe: A Shared Story? (with James Renton, Palgrave 2017). Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2492-1384