1The 2021 SEAC conference in Avignon—‘Disrupting’ the City: Urban Cris(e)s in Contemporary British Literature and Art’—was three years in the making and almost never happened. While the irony of a conference on disruption/crisis being cancelled because of a pandemic will not escape our readers, the fact that it could finally be held in presentia was a tremendous relief and joy to the convenors and its participants. The tentative ‘normalcy’ experienced during those two days enhanced the importance of human exchanges in research and we would like to thank all of those who participated in the conference: the staff at Avignon Université, the SEAC members who travelled to Avignon, as well as the delegates and keynote speakers.
2Since its creation, the SEAC’s interest in literature and art has often focused on the relationship between space, place, and their literary and artistic representations. To name but a few—in the last fifteen years—the 2008 conference ‘At an Angle to the World: Elsewhere in Twentieth-Century British Art’ (Catherine Lanone and Isabelle Keller) explored the possibilities offered by ‘other’ places; the 2011 instalment centred on ‘Ruins’ (Catherine Lanone and Isabelle Gadoin) and ‘the representation of remains and an unstable age’. In 2013, in Nantes, ‘The Imaginaries of Space’ (Georges Letissier, Julie Morère and Claire Patin) were evoked while the 2017 conference in London tackled ‘Landscape/Cityscape (and) Situational Identity in British Literature and Visual Arts (20th–21st Centuries)’ (Catherine Bernard, Isabelle Gadoin and Catherine Lanone). The 2021 SEAC conference thus prolongs the work of the SEAC community of researchers while steering the attention towards the state of crisis which seems to dominate contemporary representations of urban life in literature and art. The variety of papers that were born from it testify to the broad, interdisciplinary scope of the project as well as the vitality of research in the field.
3It is commonly acknowledged that the ‘spatial turn’ humanities took in the late 1990s can be traced back to French philosopher and architect Henry Lefebvre’s attempt at redefining the notion of space in the early 1960s, by incorporating Marxist criticism into geographical studies. Lefebvre’s famous assertion of the individual’s ‘right to the city’ as ‘a transformed and renewed right to urban life’ (156) powerfully described and lamented the gradual exclusion of the working classes from the city as a corollary to their disenfranchisement as citizens, and prophetically announced 21st–century rebellious movements such as the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) acting out, sometimes violently and erratically, against their lost ‘right to the city’. At the same period, Foucault evoked the ‘carceral city’, part of the carceral archipelago, in which, as Neal Alexander explains, ‘the city provides the space through which more “enlightened” strategies of punishment and control are mediated, and the early reformist conviction that “what must be maximised is the representation of the penalty, not its corporal reality” leads Foucault to imagine its natural extrapolation as the “punitive city”’ (28). A decade later, in the 1980s, Michel De Certeau elaborated on the tensions at work in urban life by famously stating that ‘space is a practiced place’ and coining the concepts of ‘strategies’—‘the “calculus” of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment”’—that is to say the rules according to which places are built and organised, and ‘tactics’,—‘a calculus which cannot count on a “proper”’ (xxi)—, that is to say how individuals constantly deal with the aforementioned strategies, actualise them and sometimes evade them in the creation of an individual ‘space’.
4Although these three milestones in spatial theory by no means encompass the diversity of the research on the city and urban life in the second half of the 20th century, they do make visible the fact that, far from envisioning a Greek polis, i.e. the spatial metonymy of democracy, theorists seem to have thought the city as both a desirable and indispensable social political centre for society (Lefebvre), and the reification of structures of control trapping the individual into the net of economic, judicial and political forces that could not be resisted.
5Conceptually building on that tension, geographer Edward Soja, envisioned a ‘spatial’ turn in the humanities in his Postmodern Geographies, as he called for ‘the new combination of history and geography to take shape dialectically and pragmatically’ and noted that ‘the emerging postmodern critical human geography must continue to be built upon a radical deconstruction, a deeper exploration of those critical silences in the texts, narratives and intellectual landscapes of the past, an attempt to reinscribe and resituate the meaning and significance of space in history and historical materialism’ (73). The spatial turn signalled the possibility of a different trajectory in the humanities, in which academic disciplines would not be mutually exclusive in their methods and scope and in which previous categorisations and trends would be re-assessed in terms of spatiality.
6Although it may have reconciled the hitherto contradictory approaches to urban space propounded by history and geography, the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities did not translate into appeasement and/or unity in artistic and literary representations of the contemporary city and urban life. Indeed, crisis and disruption rather appeared as preferential angles through which the city in art and literature could be studied.
7One may however wonder why the term ‘disruption’ should be used in conjunction with that of ‘crisis’. Perhaps counterintuitively, ‘disruption’ is not a recent concept: first coined during the 17th century, the term was initially defined as a ‘violent dissolution of continuity’ (OED 1), and originally only perceived negatively. It was then recuperated in the 1990s by market experts in order to rebrand crisis and change as potentially positive forces. In How Disruption Brought Order, Jean-Marie Dru breaks down disruption into three steps: after identifying the mechanisms of an established system, the innovative creation that goes against the grain will challenge those conventions. The final step of such inventive disruption is the rise of a new order, a new system that takes after the initially disturbing or altering creation (Dru 1–2). According to its proponents, disruption is not simply a process that challenges an established order, it is first and foremost an innovation that ultimately allows the advent of a new era, while promoting the virtues of a ‘contradictory spirit’ if and when ‘it is expressed collectively’ (Dru 2). Beyond the business ‘buzzword’ now strongly connected to advertising and marketing concepts, we mean to define and illustrate the theoretical difference between disruption and crisis, and to look into whether the ‘positive’ potential of disruption may be perceived in contemporary representations of urban life, or even the city itself. Indeed, in one of the first studies of disruption in arts, Koch and Nanz insist that ‘the first thing that needs to be emphasized is the productive character of disruptions’ (ix). The two sociologists contend that ‘experimental systems of aesthetic disruption harbor an epistemological potential that can prove seminal in observing and critiquing the political-cultural constitutive conditions of acts referring to the world in the media’ (xi). In other words, it seems that disruption as a marketing concept has itself been disrupted in order to be ideologically and artistically targeted at what originally produced it: the capitalistic organisation of contemporary Western society.
8Indeed, the notions of target and telos at the core of disruption may be considered as what distinguishes it from that of ‘crisis’. The term ‘crisis’, originally the ‘turning point of a disease for better or for worse, also applied to any marked or sudden variation occurring in the progress of a disease’ may also function metaphorically as a ‘decisive stage in the progress of anything’ (OED 1 and 3). While these acceptations share with disruption the features of referring to a moment of paradigmatic change, with an uncertain resolution, they also widely differ. Crises, whether occurring literally in the progress of a disease or figuratively in politics, commerce or society, are unsought unexpected developments, while disruptions proceed from careful observation of a seminal, canonical state and deliberate disturbance of a status quo. This confrontation of the two terms also reveals that the denouement of both may not be catastrophic or result in destruction. Quite the opposite, the aim of disruption is to create the conditions of a new order emerging from a deliberate disturbance.
9This collection of essays is dedicated to exploring both the various representations of urban spaces in a state of crisis on the one hand and the deliberate aesthetic strategies used to disrupt generic, aesthetic of political conventions on the other hand.
10While literary criticism has not (yet) explicitly tackled the matter of ‘urban crises’, or even ‘urban disruption’, a cursory glance at the material published in the last two decades (see Bibliography) points to the fact that the city in contemporary literature is nothing if ridden with crises, albeit in an artistically productive way, for it seems that the urban space is often used by novelists as a topos to their logos, a spatial arrangement, or metonymy, of contemporary crises. According to Nick Bentley, the postmodern metropolis may fall into either one of three main categories and represent either ‘a labyrinthine enigma that metaphorically stands in for the dizzying plurality of contemporary urban living’, ‘the physical manifestation of a culture of consumerist excess . . . in which an implicit critique of contemporary culture is manifest alongside the dehumanizing effect of hyper-urban living’ or ‘a palimpsest of histories and narratives evoked in the psyche of the observer–the postmodern flâneur of flâneuse who attempts to disentangle its multiplicity of texts’ (175–176). Building on the ‘spatial turn’, disruption, or crisis in urban life is not only represented through the understanding of macro, historical changes that have socially and architecturally shaped the city, but also through the very spatiality of urban life. To take but one example, Ian McEwan’s Saturday does provide an insightful series of models representing the cogs and wheels of the urban machine, for instance the ‘coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work’ (12). However, it first and foremost crucially gives life to De Certeau’s conception of space and place, in which Baxter, the dangerous thug, tactically evades the strategies that Perowne comfortably dwells in, that is to say the gradual eviction of the working class from London’s city centre, and violently disrupts the neurosurgeon’s private life, while London itself is being disrupted by the protests against the war in Iraq. The novel can then be read as a series of spatial collisions, between the private (home) and the professional (Perowne’s hospital), the wealthy, cultured middle class and the working class, or even the West and the East, which can profitably be understood, through Soja’s notion of ‘spatial justice’ (or in this case ‘injustice’)—an elaboration on Lefebvre’s right to the city: ‘Fighting for the right to the city seen in this way, as a demand for greater control over how the spaces in which we live are socially produced wherever we may be located, becomes virtually synonymous with seeking spatial justice’ (6–7).
11Indeed, it seems that in the last two decades, British literature has used the city, especially London, as the place in which contemporary crises should be staged, and the space through which those crises, and disruption, could take shape and be understood. As Julian Wolfreys has it, ‘What our focus on the singularity of London brings into sharp relief is a problem in, and for, philosophy, a crisis at the heart of thinking that is as old as philosophical discourse itself’ (19). Will Self’s works epitomise such a use of the city as a canvas for various crises. The Book of Dave and Great Apes feature alternative post-apocalyptic and dystopian versions of London, either in ruins in the first instance or ruled by apes in the latter, presenting readers with no less than the collapse of humanity and civilisation altogether. Such collections as The Quantity Theory of Insanity or Walking to Hollywood, may come to mind for the depiction of identity breakdown or mental crises that they offer. For instance, in the latter, a semi-autobiographical parodic travelogue, each chapter takes place in a different metropolis which corresponds to a different form of mental disorder, ranging from schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s disease. More than a mere backdrop to the representation of the diseased mind, Will Self’s uncanny urbanscapes show the active part played by contemporary city life in fostering and feeding frenzy. Interestingly, Will Self’s earlier works may also illustrate a ‘perverted’ mechanism of disruption, where the disruptive fantastic or uncanny elements introduced to shatter the illusion of a realistic narrative are immediately reintegrated within a new regime of normalcy, in a process akin to the one described by Jean-Marie Dru. Through various ‘strategies of renormalisation’ (Rospide 2009), disruption is ultimately used against itself, to demonstrate the acceptance of—or blindness to—evermore dysfunctional belief systems and claustrophobic urban environments.
12As the examples of McEwan and Self illustrate, the urban seems to be the privileged space onto which novelists project their conceptions of contemporary crises: one may also think of Jonathan Coe’s representation of the vampiric hold of finance and capital over London in Number 11, depriving the working class of its ‘right to the city’ and precipitating economic, urban and personal crises. Similarly, Zadie Smith’s 2012 NW convincingly stages the characters’ struggle to inhabit their own ‘space’, in a city represented as a ‘place’ (to use De Certeau’s categories) that now follows the rules of the market. In doing so, the elaborate work on language metafictionally incarnates the search for ‘spatial justice’ and the spatial tensions which structure the urban.
13However, thinking of language as a form of disruption—rather than a stable structure afflicted with ‘crisis’—might bring more to the argument. In Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019), as in NW, language appears as a disruptive force that both manifests the crisis in urban life and might provide the conditions of a new, fairer order. While the novel’s assessment of the spatial divide in London, and of the working class’s—especially the immigrant working class’s—confiscated right to the city, is very similar to that of Coe, or Smith, its gender politics, revealed through disruptive writing (the novel famously did away with all punctuation marks), may, as Koch and Nanz put it, be ultimately ‘productive’ to the extent that it allows a redefinition of gender identity. As Groes, commenting on such novelists as Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, or Andrea Levy, explains: ‘The work of these writers does not celebrate London’s state of crisis, but what their representations share is a cheerful optimism about the future of the metropolis, and, above all, the possibilities it offers to inscribe new voices and histories into the urban fabric’ (261). While one may not share Groes’s statement of ‘optimism’ about the future of the metropolis, disruption still does bring about the possibility of renewal and change into the ‘urban fabric’.
14Language may then be considered as performing disruption rather than merely representing it, as will be evoked in the third part of this collection. Contemporary fictions that feature the urban environment in a state of crisis effectively often mirror those disruptions in the very way language is used. As if following Dru’s guidelines for effective disruption, the text’s refusal of quintessential linguistic conventions initially creates chaos and challenges readers to question syntactic conventions. In a final turn of the screw, readers are led to accept this radical new vision of language—as fluid, connected and open to change—as the new norm, aptly demonstrating that disrupted language is also a disruptive force that both incarnates the crises in urban life while providing the conditions of a new, fairer way of presenting and thinking urban identities and voices.
15Within the framework of this collection of essays, the fundamental difference between crises and disruptions begs further exploration, in order to focus on the notions of telos and intentionality that lay at the core of the deliberate process that is disruption. Some of the articles gathered here focus on the aftermath of such turning points while others analyse the critical circumstances and contexts that led to them or explore the textual or artistic practices creating disruptive patterns.
16The first part of this collection, ‘Historicizing Disruption: Past & Future’ is a diachronic examination of the literary topoi linked with crises and of various figures and motifs inscribing disruption within the texts, from the early 20th century to the early 21st century.
17Maud de Luget’s essay focuses on the cognitive disruption entailed by the advent of modern means of transportation during the early 20th century, which translates into the Modernist fragmented perception of the city. She examines the strategies through which such disruptive aesthetics as Woolf’s and Forster’s also foreground moments of connection and ultimately her essay highlights the processes of resilience or adaptation that are central to disruption. Similarly, James Dalrymple explores the disruptive effects of flânerie and flight, as processes curtailing the topos of the city as a labyrinth entrapping the individuals, in his essay dedicated to crime novels and more specifically James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, while Quitterie de Beauregard delves into the aftermath of apocalyptic crises in speculative fiction of the late 20th century. Focusing on the motif of ruins in the works of Richard Jefferies (After London, 1911), J.G. Ballard (The Drowned World, 1962) and Angela Carter (The Passion of New Eve, 1977), De Beauregard offers a diachronic examination of the evolving aesthetic values of post-apocalyptic topoi such as ashes, traces, and nostalgia in speculative fiction.
18Such a selection of papers reveals the diversity and richness of patterns representing disruption within the text, which prompted a second part entitled ‘Art and Disruption’, dedicated to the artistic practices enacting disruption within the very body of the city itself.
19Charlotte Gould’s article examines the various ways artists have striven to keep public art relevant to today’s British cities and to resist commodification in the face of various crises—namely the crisis of public spaces, with the emergence of POPS (Privately-owned public spaces)—, the climate change crisis and the Covid crisis, echoing Laura Ouillon’s exploration of the crisis of the British—or more specifically English—identity after Brexit in a paper dedicated to Martin Collishaw’s installation Albion (2017). Finally, Stephane Sadoux focuses on the London squat party scene, which appeared as early as the 1990s, at a time when the city’s urban fabric was being radically altered by industrial decline. He demonstrates that the illegal occupancy of abandoned buildings to accommodate parties is not only fostered by opportunity: it also constitutes a political and cultural reaction to the nightclub business model, and, more broadly, to Thatcherite policies. It illustrates the idea that disruption may ultimately be rather creative than destructive, while underground culture co-exists with a dominant club culture.
20This notion of disruption being infused with creative vitality rather than with a desire to negate or erase previous traditions, values or generic standards is further developed and explored in all its ambivalence in the third part of this collection. Entitled ‘Centre and Margins’, this section gathers essays that examine how postcolonial or BAME authors negotiate the notions of minority, marginality, identity and multiculturalism within the urban space.
21Rebecca Blanchard draws a comparison between the representations of ‘bare lives’—as defined by Giorgio Agamben—in the suburbs depicted in two works of contemporary fiction: Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018) and Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). While both narratives are linked by their treatment of social crises—outbursts of violence, police brutality, hyper surveillance and overexposure—they also feature revitalised and renewed creative practices such as grime and rap music. This aspect is further developed in George Letissier’s essay, also dedicated to In Our Mad and Furious City, with a focus on the crisis of the event and the linguistic disruption operated by grime lyrics and music. Such a reflection on the power of written/spoken words and poetry to disrupt linguistic conventions and to challenge a traditional approach to centres and margins is further explored in John Sannae’s ‘Speaking the City, Disrupting the City: How immigrant-descent Spoken Word poets reclaim Britain’s postcolonial multicultural cities by enacting their disruption(s)’. According to him, ‘this poetry is a literature, a lyric of everyday disruption, dialogue, and renegotiation, in a process of decolonial renegotiation of both the British city and its literature, accelerated and been brought to the fore with the internet age, moving beyond the immediate physical community of the city to be shaped in online spaces that are intimately connected to the everyday lives of people and places’.
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