Riots in Literature
Editor: David Bell and Gerald Porter
Date Of Publication: Jun 2008
Isbn13: 9781847185822
Isbn: 1-84718-582-7
Riots in Literature addresses representations of crowd disorder as manifestations of popular politics, including colonial and postcolonial contexts. The terms used to describe disorder are themselves, of course, contested. Words like “mob,” “demonstration” and “protest,” not to mention “riot’ itself, denote a particular perspective based on an elitist taxonomy for dealing with social and cultural phenomena in society. Of primary concern is the way in which the text describes and designates crowd behaviour using the language of denigration, metaphors of the primitive and animalistic, brutal images, and silences, and where the mediation of the event is expressed in terms of the binary order/disorder.

The contributors to this volume are interested in the analysis of the interaction of official political culture and crowd politics as represented in literature and orature, and how such representations contribute to the discourses of authority and subversion of their period. The essays are wide-ranging and explore the phenomenon of riots in literature through studies of popular risings in Shakespeare; Carlyle and the French Revolution; the Rebecca Riots in Wales; popular ballads and the Indian War of Independence in 1857, post-partition riots in India and Pakistan in the 1960s, township violence in South African fiction post-1948, the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles in detective fiction and avant garde disturbances in France of the 1920s and 1930s.

Throughout the book, these essays focus attention on the tension-filled relationship that is perceived between literature and discourses of power and popular resistance.

David Bell Ph. D. is a free-lance translator and independent researcher. His research interests include British working-class writing of the 1930s and contemporary South African fiction. In addition to articles in these fields, his publications include: Ardent Propaganda. Miners’ novels and class conflict 1929—1939 (1995), Latitude 630 North (ed. 2002) and Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus: A Dialogue Seminar (ed. 2002). He is currently co-editing a volume of critical essays on the South African writer Zakes Mda.

Gerald Porter is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Vaasa, Finland. His main interest is in radical and vernacular song and its transmission, a field in which he has published The English Occupational Song (Umeå, 1992) and (with Mary-Ann Constantine) Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song from the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford University Press).

If you Google the word “riot” you get 8,500,000 hits. The term is clearly loaded with meaning, usually negative, synonymous with violence and uncontrolled crowd behaviour. Crowds run riot, noisily, yet their individual voices are usually silenced by what E. P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. Historians like Thompson have over the years sought to rescue riots and rioters from this condition of negative collective obscurity by revisiting the archives in search of the carnivalesque contribution of the common street crowd to the long march of everyman. It is within this democratic tradition of revisionist history-from-below that Riots in Literature should be seen.

This new collection of radically challenging essays differs, however, from these previous attempts to break through the collective silence of the street-fighting past in that the focus is shifted from historical to literary representations of riots and rioters . Such a literary turn proves to be as fascinating as it is fruitful, both in terms of the range of areas covered by the collection , as well as the revealing insights each of the contributions provide. Like the earlier “linguistic turn” in Chartist studies, the radical shift of emphasis in Riots in Literature represents a new and exciting redirection of research into the fractious link between literature and the discourse of power and popular unrest.

Ronald Paul

Associate Professor of Literature

University of Gothenburg

Sweden

This essay is a timely and provocative reassessment of the role of riots and rebellion in Anglophone literary and cultural texts from the nineteenth century to modern times. The carefully contextualised and historicized articles contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the workings of power in modern societies where the voices of dissent are so often silenced. What makes the volume particularly recommendable is its sensitivity to the experience of marginalized, as testified in its excavations of popular and post-colonial narratives. The book is compulsory reading for anyone interested in dissent and power in literature and popular culture.

Jopi Nyman

Professor of English

Vice-Dean of Humanities

University of Joensuu

Riots in Literature takes up an under researched area of writing as well as rarely focused incidents in better known works, and subjects them, in a number of case studies, to sustained, extending and thoughtful discussion, not least by probing into the very language in which unruly crowd behaviour ¾ fictionalised or documented ¾ is couched. The chosen perspectives offer unusual insights into the treatment of mass action on stage and in fiction. While occasions of spontaneous rebellion of the downtrodden engage the critical sympathy of the editors and contributors, they are not blind to orchestrated violence in the interests of a repressive social or political order. How to interpret the temporary suspension of authority and power during triumphant moments of crowd action is another question exercising both the authors of the texts under discussion and the contributors to this pioneering symposium.

H. Gustav Klaus

Professor of the Literature of the British Isles, Universität Rostock, Germany

'The project, Riots in Literature, takes its point of departure from previous socio-political research, concerning the history of crowd politics, the psychology of rioters, and clashing interpretations of the same event. The eight contributors to this volume of essays note how central in the representation of riots is the question of who is speaking since the writing is usually “of”, not “by” i.e. the writer is not a member of the class actively involved in the event. So the contributors’ aim is to give a voice to the “life and dynamic change” underlying what all too frequently confronts readers as strategically distorted representations.

The contributions, ranging widely in terms of period and genre, from Shakespearian drama to contemporary fiction, stress that words like “mob” and “riot” tend to denote an elitist, exclusionary perspective. Journeying back through this stimulating array of essays to investigate the kind of textual mediation that riots or crowd disorder have prompted, the reader is led to recognise the implicit disempowerment thereby achieved. What has become generally accepted as disorder of the mob in several cases subverted by these contributors to reveal an alarming scale of disorder in the agents of authority and power, a form in fact of legalized rioting. The editors also warn, however that our new orthodoxy arising from mass democracy, may prompt a spurious romanticism of the crowd and an illusory hope of social reform.

Riots in Literature is a challenging and crucial book which deserves a wide readership. It will be particularly welcomed by students of literature, politics and sociology, but its fascinating and often deeply disturbing revelations are likely to interest all serious readers.'

J A Kearney (Professor)

Senior Research Associate

English Studies (School of Literary Studies, Media and Creative Arts)

Howard College

University of KwaZulu-Natal

Durban

South Africa

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