Sub/Urban Histories Against The Grain: Myth And Embourgeoisement In Essex Noir

Abstract

This paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working-class embourgeoisement: initially via post-War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a "dark mirror" to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress. ***** Overcoming the concept of "progress" and overcoming the concept of "period of decline" are two sides of one and the same thing (Benjamin 2002: 460).Whereas it was once the inner city or "awful East" that constituted the "internal Other" of post-imperial London, the city has recently found a new "dark place" in the foreboding, estuarial milieu of south Essex, a large region extending eastwards along the Thames and encompassing towns such as Tilbury, Grays, Basildon and Southend-on-Sea. This shift is due on one hand to the perceived loss of London's grittiness, or authenticity, an effect perhaps of widespread gentrification (Kerr 2012: 18); and on the other, to the symbolic pull of a place that has become "a key political signifier in contemporary British culture" (Dave 2006: 152). The purpose of this article is to interrogate the literary and cinematic noir spaces of south Essex in order to understand first, the "aesthetics of change" (Pusca 2010) deployed in imagining the collapse of the post-War settlement and the socio-spatial re-orderings this instigated in the south east of England; and second, the politics of social class at stake in this aesthetic portrayal of sub/urban history (the making visible of what Sennett and Cobb (1972) referred to as the "hidden injuries of class"). Sources used in this historical sociological analysis range from literary sources to "true crime" memoirs and neo-noir/ pulp films.

Creative Methodologies for a Mobile Criminology: Walking as Critical Pedagogy

“…That is its task and its promise’ (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 7–8). Criminology has adopted this imaginative approach primarily through cultural criminology, which focuses on everyday meanings of crime, transgression, and phenomenological analysis as well as methodologies that are predominantly ethnographic, textual, visual, and participatory (Brown and Carrabine, 2017; Carrabine, 2012; Ferrell, 1993, 2006; Ferrell et al, 2004; Ferrell and Hamm, 1998; Hayward and Presdee, 2010; Millington, 2016; O’Brien M, 2005; O’Neill, 2010, 2015, 2017; Rafter, 2014). Cultural criminology, for us, adopts a criminologically imaginative stance to research following in the footsteps of the Chicago school (sociological research; see Anderson, 1923; Shaw, 1931; Thomas and Znaniecki, 1958 [1918]).…”