Assembly, People, Multitude: Figures of Collective Protest in British Literature and Culture, 1979-2022

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Benjamin Kohlmann
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542994203

In recent years scholars have brought much important attention to (literary and cultural) representations of socio-economic precarisation and vulnerabilisation, esp. as these processes affect individual lives under neoliberalism. By contrast, significantly less attention has been paid to the rich and complex ways in which moments of collective political protest feature in recent British fiction, television, and film, and/or to the ways in which these works aim to create openings for radical critique and activism. My project seeks to remedy this lack by considering a series of artefacts from the decades between 1979 (the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister) and 2022, a period of intensifying economic neoliberalisation and its dramatic socio-economic and political fallout. Artworks considered in this project range from literary texts from the early 1980s that seek to reactivate the experimental ‘proletarian’ aesthetic of the interwar years to more recent fiction and poetry by authors such as China Miéville, David Peace, Zadie Smith, and Sean Bonney. But the project also builds substantially on television programmes and films, ranging from the BBC television series Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and the Newsreel Collective’s Welcome to the Spiv Economy (1986) to Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliott (2000) and Matthew Warchus’s Pride (2014), which revisits the unexpected alliance between miner and queer collectives during the anti-Thatcherite miners’ strike of 1984-5. As a means of exploring this body of work, my project draws on several—conceptually distinct, though occasionally historically linked—terms that can help us describe different types of collectivity. The concepts assembly, people, and multitude are of course not unique to the period under examination here, but they received important new theorisations from the 1980s onwards, and it is in this spirit that I mobilise them here. Most crucially, assembly, people, and multitude were increasingly seen to demarcate three distinctive scales at which collectivities can manifest, ranging from the local (‘assembly’) and national (‘the people’) to the fully global (‘multitude’). My project deploys these terms not as a fixed analytic grid or exhaustive critical vocabulary but as an important and useful heuristic that can help us identify and describe key figurations of collectivities in literary and cultural texts from the decades around 2000. The emphasis on “figures” in the title of my project is intended to capture the attention which recent scholarship has brought to the constitutive role that questions of representation, naming, and figuration play in the imagining of collectives. In this context, the phrase “figures of protest” flags the vital and distinctive contribution which literary and cultural studies—given their expertise in unpacking the rhetorical and formal aspects of such acts of figuration—can make to an exploration of modes of collective protest.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants