Making the street visible: Placing racial violence in context

Abstract

This article suggests that in attempting to generalise from the specific there is a danger that academic analysis of a subject such as ‘racial violence’ suppresses the significance of the context in which ‘racial’ antagonisms develop. The article examines the manner in which a vocubulary of urban space, drawing in particular on the rhetoric and realities of ‘the streets’, is useful in understanding the horrific events of late 1993 and 1994 in the East End of London. In part this demonstrates the interdependence of processes of representation and practises of mobilisation in the development of the new public spaces of the city. The streets of the East End are the simultaneous product of struggles of resistance, local political cultures, a particular articulation of a post‐industrial political‐economy and urban myths of gang violence. As both a privileged metaphor informing popular knowledge and the site of adolescent socialisation the streets are rendered visible in particular debates about mainstream politics, ‘community’ and gang violence. In this sense both academically and ethically there is a need to eschew any crude distinction between the ‘metaphoric’ and the ‘real’ streets of the East End. Images and icons of East End life are as significant in informing the practises of institutions of the welfare state as are the actions of groups and individuals at any moment in time. It also demonstrates that an understanding of contemporary racism depends on the development of an interpretative framework that is sensitive to the ‘historicity’ and ‘spatiality’ of racial conflict. Anti‐racist practise needs to confront simultaneously the representational practises which normalise bigoted understanding of cultures as well as the institutional forms and economic forces which draw on and amplify processes of criminalisation and racialised deprivation.

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