This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 02 November 2014, At: 21:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual Culture in BritainPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb20

Reading the Riot ActEddie ChambersPublished online: 17 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Eddie Chambers (2013) Reading the Riot Act, Visual Culture in Britain, 14:2, 238-256, DOI:10.1080/14714787.2013.782156

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.782156

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Eddie Chambers

Reading the Riot Act

This article explores some of the ways in which the act of rioting has been visua-lized, firstly within reggae music and secondly within the work of several blackBritish artists. The article begins with a consideration of images of burning build-ings that were captured during the course of the riots in England in the summer of2011, before briefly discussing some of the pitfalls in the terminology and languageof the ‘riot’. The article discusses the somewhat counter-cultural view of rioting asreflected in reggae music, and the profoundly empathetic view of rioters that isarguably advanced in the work of several key black British artists, across severalgenerations. It argues that the works it discusses do much to shed light on why anygiven riot, involving black people, takes place.

Keywords: rioting, reggae music, black British history, black British artists, albumcovers

London, summer 2011. In a scene replicated across the capital, a hugehome furnishings shop is ablaze. The spectacle is a veritable display ofdramatic pyrotechnics, as near-theatrical explosions are emitted throughthe orifices of the building that is, by now, way beyond any sort of saving.One such store was House of Reeves in Croydon, south London, which,like other such ill-fated buildings, dominated the street intersections of acity block (Figure 1). The store had first opened in 1867 and had, so sectionsof the British press were fond of recounting, survived two world wars. Thissnippet of information was meant to be much more than an incidentaldetail. The fact that House of Reeves had survived the First World War waspretty much neither here nor there – the urban fabric of Britain was hardlytroubled by the Great War. Instead, its casualties were the young men ofEurope, who died in unprecedented and quite horrific numbers on thebattlefields of Europe. But surviving the Blitz and the Second World Warwas quite another matter. Contemporary constructions of Britain’snational identity were heavily reliant on notions that this plucky, under-siege, sceptred isle had withstood the onslaught of Hitler’s sustainedbombing campaigns and had emerged bloodied but unbowed. Not onlythat: Britain and its characteristic bulldog spirit, under the guidance ofWinston Churchill, had emerged victorious in the fight against fascismand the fight for freedom and justice. In this regard, House of Reeves hadstood as a beacon of British steely resolve in the face of intimidation, and itwas this resolve that, in part at least, made Britain the great nation it was.By destroying the store, those responsible had, according to sections of themedia, raised a metaphorical middle finger to Britain’s self-image.1 Thereis something quite mesmerizing about photographs of the largest burningbuildings that were (along with the tragic loss of human life) the mostconspicuous casualties of the summer riots. This might, in part at least,

Visual Culture in Britain, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.782156

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

have something to do with the self-evident inability of fire fighters tocontain, let alone extinguish, these towering infernos. In the course ofour regular day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year existence, wewould never see buildings so spectacularly ablaze. Most fires in ourtowns and cities are isolated occurrences, rapidly brought under control,by sprinkler systems or the brisk deployment of fire fighters. The image ofriot-torn neighbourhoods, frequently distinguished by the trope of thewell-ablaze building, represents a different kind of urban environment,one made over in the rioters’ image. It is this notion, of the visualizing ofthe different spaces created by rioters, that this article seeks to explore.While riots have taken place for centuries, in a great many differentcountries, settings and circumstances, I propose to explore the notion ofthe riot as it exists in aspects of contemporary Caribbean visual and auralculture. (And in turn, the ways in which such cultural resonances havearguably made their way into the psyche of rioters in England.)

Over the past several decades, a significant proportion of the riots inmainland Britain have involved some proportion or other of African-Caribbean males.2 In some instances, the proportion, or numbers, ofAfrican-Caribbean youth caught up in rioting may well be relativelysmall – Britain’s black population is, in percentage terms, very much atthe modest end of the single-figure spectrum – but, given the factor ofconspicuousness, the darker skins of black British youngsters mean thatthey are invariably the ones identified by the police and the media as beingkey participants in riots that occur. The pathology whereby the riotbecomes raced is perhaps most explicit in the American terminology, raceriot. When a percentage of those caught up in urban unrest in Americancities are perceived to be black, the mainstream media tend to label suchdisturbances as race riots. There is, though, no equivalent or correspond-ing term for when whites riot. Consequently, the Tulsa Riot of May 31 andJune 1, 1921 (which was a widespread, racially motivated conflict, in whichwhites attacked and effectively destroyed the thriving African American

Figure 1. House of Reeves.Photo: Eddie Mulholland.Reproduced by permission ofTelegraph Media GroupLimited (TMG).

Eddie Chambers 239

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

neighbourhoods of Tulsa, Oklahoma) has by and large passed into obscur-ity, not being typically regarded as a race riot in the commonly understooduse of the term. Furthermore, the dominant society has, seemingly withoutdifficulty, created a pathological space in which to effortlessly insert thenotion of the menacing black troublemaker. As Kobena Mercer has noted,‘On the front page headlines black males become highly visible as a threatto white society, as muggers, rapists, terrorists and guerrillas: their bodiesbecome the imago [sic] of a savage and unstoppable capacity for destruc-tion and violence’.3

At this point, terminology is of considerable importance. One struggles,more often than not, to identify an alternative word that is free from themedia’s notion of a riot. Mainstream press coverage of riots inevitably castthem as mindless anarchic sprees of criminality, in which the mob, con-sisting by and large of incorrigibly feral youth, go on the rampage. Thisseemingly indelible association with mindless violence ensures that theword riot is in essence, hugely problematic. Sections of the British media,seeking an easily understood and easily digestible summation, labelled the2011 riots as ‘shopping with violence’. The term, though, does little tonothing to deepen any sort of genuine understanding of what happenedduring those days. Yet we run into difficulties when reaching for alter-native adjectives for burning and looting, as Martin Kettle and LucyHodges have found and discussed.4

Existing English law, for instance, defines a riot in a very specific way. It requires three ormore people with a common purpose to be prepared to help one another, by force if necessary,against anyone opposing them. If they then carry out that purpose and force or violence takesplace that would ‘alarm at least one person of reasonable firmness and courage’, then, says thelaw, that is a riot.5

The limitations of legal definitions of what constitutes a riot were throwninto sharp relief in the summer of 2011, in a number of English cities. Aquasi-official report6 and no end of press and media coverage notwith-standing, it is impossible to determine categorically that those caught up inthe rioting were acting with any sort of ‘common purpose’. And, ratherthan being ‘prepared to help one another’, looters are more likely to bemotivated by what they themselves as individuals can harvest from anygiven opportunity for looting that might present itself or be created. Kettleand Hodges continued: ‘The common usage of the word is, however, muchbroader. Most people would probably agree that when a large group ofpeople use violence in public against people or property and the autho-rities cannot immediately control them, then that is a riot.’ Quite correctly,the authors added, ‘Even so, this leaves scope for disagreement anddifferent interpretations. Some would object on principle to the use of theword riot at all.’

Precisely what sort of number might constitute ‘a large group of people’,Kettle and Hodges do not volunteer. The nub of Kettle and Hodge’sassertion was that ‘[t]he use of the word riot is therefore a problem. Butnone of the other words that have been used causes any less difficulty.Hooliganism, public disorder, protest, rebellion, uprising – all presenttheir own problems. In the circumstances, "riot" will have to do’.

240 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

But, while we might be stuck, for better or for worse, with the term ‘riot’,there is no unanimity about its meaning, though certain meanings – suchas those advanced by the police, the government and sections of themedia – do of course dominate. Setting such meanings to one side, I seekto explore what amounts to a counter-cultural perspective on rioting, asvisualized within the iconography of reggae music and by a number ofblack British artists. I would argue that the riot could be understood as anattempt by rioters to apply something of an extreme makeover to thedecidedly problematic spaces (neighbourhoods, high streets, shoppingcentres) in which the rioters find themselves or to which they gravitate.The images of burning buildings such as House of Reeves resonate withrighteous retribution heaped upon the avaricious and the ungodly. Wecan, without difficulty, compare mid- to late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century visual tropes of riot-affected burning buildings, such as the blaz-ing and doomed House of Reeves store, with Victorian apocalyptic paint-ings such as John Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of 1852.Martin, who was one of the most popular painters in Britain of his day,specialized in vast canvases of the ancient world in chaos, and ungodlycities in the grip of godly retribution.7 Like the image of the burningfurniture store a century and a half later, Martin’s Sodom and Gomorrah isa veritable display of dramatic pyrotechnics, as awesome and cata-strophic fire and brimstone rain down in righteous damnation of thegodless city, which is, by now, way beyond any sort of saving by God orman.

Furthermore, twentieth- and twenty-first-century images of buildingsand shops burning out of control represent, in the most graphic of ways,a failure to heed reggae group Culture’s stern admonition to ‘Mr RichMan’ to ‘share the riches with the poor, before they share their povertywith you’.8 These images represent a visualizing of a day of reckoning –capitalism (or at least, its accessible symbols) being given something ofan urban shakedown: those shops that could be plundered being dulyrelieved of their inventories and other buildings, other property, goingto blazes.

Certain riots have occurred at key historical points that have served tobenchmark the birth and testy growth of black Britain. As such, the ‘rioter’has on occasion been framed as occupying a certain blessed position in thevanguard of struggle. A. Sivanandan recalled, ‘By the middle of the 1970s,the youth had begun to emerge into the vanguard of black struggle. Andthey brought to it not only the traditions of their elders but an experience oftheir own, which was implacable [sic] of racism and impervious to theblandishments of the state.’9 This position frequently and most clearly tookthe form of an active resistance to police ‘downpression’. The police cameto symbolize and embody the forces, the institutions and the various formsof endless pressure that tormented so much of young black Britain. By themid-1970s, this resistance was beginning to take the form of anti-police‘rioting’. The ‘inner-city’ riot was, for young black Britain, a new voice, anew form of expression. Armed with the weapons of the weapon-less,‘bottles and bricks and sticks’,10 some young black males refused to yieldterritory, their territory, without a fight and gladly, willingly, shouldered

Eddie Chambers 241

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

the burden of self-appointed ghetto defenders. A number of black Britishartists made work that effectively empathized with these youths. DonaldRodney, one of the artists discussed in this text, would make extensive useof a newspaper photograph of such a ghetto defender, described as a‘prowling West Indian petrol bomber’ who made an appearance in severalnewspapers (Figure 2). The lone youth pictured strode purposefully, con-fidently, righteously (some might say menacingly) with petrol bomb inhand, presumably identifying and approaching his quarry, duringthe course of a riot in Rodney’s native Birmingham. In bestowing on this‘rioter’ an almost iconic status, Donald Rodney, like Linton Kwesi Johnsonbefore him, was underlining the militancy, dedication, consciousness andimportance of these ghetto youths who were ‘measuring the time for bombsand for burnin’.11

In their book, Race, Politics and Social Change, John Solomos and Les Blackdescribe and contextualize the press image as follows:

The dominant newspaper image was a picture of a young black man carrying a lit petrolbomb. The picture . . . documented a skirmish that took place in the aftermath of a visit toBirmingham by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. The Daily Express, the Mirror, the Sun, theObserver and the Daily Mail all used the photograph. The papers announced the arrival of thelatest racial insurgent: ‘He walks with a chilling swagger, a petrol bomb in hand and hateburning in his heart.’ (Daily Telegraph, September 11, 1985)

Figure 2. A youth carrying afire-bomb on the second dayof the Handsworth riots inBirmingham. # PressAssociation Images.

242 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Solomos and Black then quoted a wholly fictitious account which, in themanner of such reports, had rapidly assumed the status of irrefutable factthat chimed with dominant pathologies of violent, derelict, homicidalblack youth, to which images of industrious, entrepreneurial Asians pro-vided such a stark and noble contrast.

A black thug stalks a Birmingham street with hate in his eyes and a petrol bomb in his hand.The prowling West Indian was one of the hoodlums who brought new race terror to the city’sriot-torn Handsworth district yesterday . . . Two Asian brothers screamed in agony as WestIndian rioters beat them – and left them to burn alive in the petrol-bombed sub-post office.(Sun, September 11, 1985)

As Solomos and Black reasoned:

The dominant theme of the reporting of these events suggested that a ‘race riot’ had takenplace and that the death of the Moledina brothers was a result of tension between the African-Caribbean and Asian communities. This was despite factual details such as the presence oflarge numbers of whites and Asians on the streets who were arrested during this incident, andthe fact that the person charged for the Molendina murders was in fact white.

Subsequently, the researchers summarized: ‘The ‘‘black mugger’’ wassurpassed by a new folk demon, the ‘‘black bomber’’. This shift not onlyassociated black youth with crimes against the person but also crimesagainst society.’12

Fire, that most primeval of elements, has a place of great significance inNew World African diaspora culture. Fire is a longstanding metaphor forlight and assorted manifestations of illumination. But it is also a symbol ofjudgement, destruction and God’s day of reckoning. In the words of theNegro spiritual, ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the firenext time’. Within the abiding imagery of the riot, we see not so much thefire next time, as the fire this time. The notion of the fire this time was seizedupon by the Economist, which used the words as the title of one of itsreports on the disturbances of summer 2011.13 This notion of willing thefire to do its best (or, perhaps, do its worst) has an absorbing and compel-ling antecedent in the legendary phrase ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’.14 Thoughmany riots have no explicit racial dimension, what some might regard asa satisfying spectacle, of justifiable conflagration, is indelibly linked tocenturies of dreadful treatment meted out to black people, beginningwith the slave ship and the auction block. Destruction by fire is God’swork, and the looters, who seemingly are an intrinsic component of theriot, take up where God left off. The popular counter-cultural framing ofthe riot is, I would argue, one that takes as its blueprint the seminal track bythe Wailers, ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’, taken from their 1973 album, Burnin’.

In ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ Marley had named and identified the riot as apositive act of purification, redemption and political integrity. This auda-cious and profoundly empathetic act struck an international cord withfractious black British youngsters and Jamaican ghetto sufferers alike.Thereafter, rioting would never be considered by many of those caughtup in such situations as being the negative, destructive and anarchic actthat others, particularly the mainstream media and the forces of ‘law andorder’ took it to be. When the Wailers sang: ‘That’s why we’re gonna be

Eddie Chambers 243

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight ... burnin’ all illusions tonight, burnin’ allpollution tonight’ rioting was, for some people at least, for evermoretransformed from a violent expression of protest against perceived injus-tices into an almost sacred act of righteousness, of purification, of judge-ment. Four years later, British reggae group Merger again celebrated the‘riot’ in a song called ‘77’. Offering a transgressive alternative to theQueen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977, they sang about the yearbeing ‘a festival of destruction time’.15

Maureen Sheridan offered the following appraisal of ‘Burnin’ andLootin’:

‘Dat song about burnin’ and lootin’ is [about] illusions . . . the illusions of capitalists and dempeople with the big bank accounts,’ said Marley.

To say that ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ was controversial in a country where angry, frustratedpeople routinely block roads with burning tires just to have their voice heard, is far too mild away to describe the song’s actual impact. Jamaica’s volatile society has always been open tothe incendiary messages of its musical idols. Although Marley could say a couple of yearslater that the tune was about ‘illusions’, what it was really about was ‘burnin’ and lootin;’ andgiving the ghetto youth the go-ahead to help themselves.

Curfews are no longer as common as they were in the Seventies, and when they’re enforced,they’re usually warranted. But as well as being useful in curbing spontaneous outbreaks ofviolence, curfews are a clever way to control rebellion. With the growing influence of Rastaand reggae music, rebellion of the self-styled ‘sufferahs’ was but a drum beat away, and theauthorities had to find a way to stop it.

‘Babylon nuh waan peace, Babylon waan power,’ was Bob’s defence of his militantapproach. ‘My songs have a message of righteousness’, he explained. But in anotherinterview, he made it clear that he wasn’t a pacifist. ‘Me don’ love fighting, but me don’ lovewickedness either.’16

A number of black artists found themselves charmed by Marley’s refer-ence to the burning of illusions and pollution. In 1981, filmmaker MenelikShabazz had made a feature-length film which he titled Burning an Illusion.Its publicity described it as being ‘the story of a black woman’s awaken-ing’. Years later, in conversation with Lubaina Himid, Donald Rodneyreferred to some of the influences that lay behind the making of one ofhis pieces: The Lords of Humankind (1986). This was a work, dealing withslavery and the political and psychological consequences of its aftermath,that relied heavily on written text, surrounding central images of ashackled slave and plans of slave ships crammed with human cargo. Theimages and text were executed on cotton sheets that were then extensivelyburned around parts of their edges. The sheets, when suspended from thegallery ceiling, came to resemble a grouping of flags, displaying a terribleassortment of exigent messages. Himid referred to the burned and con-spicuously damaged nature of the work. Rodney responded ‘I burnt theflags, that’s what that’s about. Burning that type of history ... I love thatphrase – ‘‘burning an illusion’’ – that’s probably why I use burning a lot.’17

‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ came out of a particular moment in Jamaica’shistory. Merely a decade after the country’s independence, ushered inwith so much pronounced optimism, Jamaica was by the early 1970s inthe grip of inflation, economic stagnation, labour unrest and the politicallysponsored terrorism that held so many Jamaicans in fear and trembling.

244 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Furthermore, the island’s police, particularly in the densely populatedcapital city of Kingston and its socially challenged neighbourhoods, hadquickly come to represent and embody a repressive public body,seemingly there to further brutalize the Jamaican sufferer. It was in thiscontext that the song ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ bridled at oppression andproposed a point of release for those who ‘couldn’t take it no more’. Thisblending, this articulation, of frustration, disaffection, political conscious-ness and rioting was but one manifestation of the socially charged natureof reggae music. The music has always been extraordinarily diverse in itsrhythms, lyrics and messages, though the pronounced influence ofRastafari presents itself as a hugely important strand of the music.18

Reggae music has spawned no end of British manifestations, from themusic of groups such as Merger, Capital Letters, Black Slate, Aswad,Cimarons and Steel Pulse through to later developments such as jungle,hip hop, electronic, ragga, drum ’n’ bass, dancehall, garage, grime anddubstep. This astonishing diversity reflects reggae’s importance to currentgenerations of British ‘subcultures’ (black, white, Asian, etc.) While theserecent and current generations of subcultures might view roots reggae andBob Marley as ancient historical antecedents, it is unquestionable thatmusic such as ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’ and other songs by the Wailers createdan enduring template that is to this day a discernible and recognizablecharacteristic of the narratives of more contemporary manifestations ofreggae.19

An intriguing consideration is the possibility that these assorted musi-cal/subcultural manifestations have been linked to a certain mainstreamtendency over recent years to ‘racialize’ the white underclass (most expli-citly since the riots of 2011) in terms previously reserved for traditionallyracist discourse, thus hinting not only at the continuing significance of(some of) reggae’s political messages, but perhaps even their passage fromthe ‘margins’ to the centre. The historian David Starkey offered a some-what unvarnished distillation of this sentiment. Using a pejorative verna-cular expression for a certain embodiment of trashy white working-classculture, Starkey, speaking on BBC 2’s Newsnight at the height of the riots,referenced the previously mentioned notion of ‘shopping with violence’and expressed the view that the riots reflected a pervasive and somewhatsinister influence of Jamaican culture on pockets of the English populace.

What this week has shown is that profound changes have happened . . . What’s happened isthat a substantial section of the chavs . . . have become black. The whites have become black. Aparticular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, andblack and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. This language, which iswholly false, which is this Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded in England. And this is whyso many of us have this sense of literally [living in] a foreign country.20

The immediate visualization of reggae music – the reggae record cover –is replete with the images and symbolism of destruction and consumptionby fire, with all its biblical resonances. One need look no further than therecord covers produced to house recordings by first the Wailers, then byBob Marley and the Wailers, during the groups’ years with Island Records.The first Island Records release was Catch a Fire. Characteristic of the

Eddie Chambers 245

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

flexibility of Jamaican patois, the title was both descriptive and imploring.The original 1973 vinyl record sleeve was one of the most singular in thehistory of album-cover graphic design, and was the work of graphic artistsRod Dyer and Bob Weiner. The 12-inch record was encased in a cardboardsleeve depicting that most iconic of American lighters, the Zippo. Thesleeve functioned like the casing of a real Zippo lighter, opening at a sidehinge to reveal the record within. When the upper ‘lid’ of the Zippo sleevewas opened, there appeared a giant flame, printed on the previouslyconcealed part of the sleeve. In effect, each time the record sleeve wasopened, as a prelude to the record itself being played, the holder of thesleeve was sparking a near literal but primarily metaphorical flame, tolight a marijuana cigarette, to illuminate a path through life (the playing ofthe record itself, with its multiple, timely and prophetic messages)21 or to‘bun dung Babylon’. The original pressing of 20,000 copies of Catch a Firehad the functional Zippo cover and subsequent pressings had the alter-native (and more practical, but much less dramatic) cover featuring aportrait of Bob Marley openly and unapologetically smoking a marijuanaspliff or joint.

Following shortly after Catch a Fire was Burnin’, the sleeve of whichfeatured the title and name of the group burned (or perhaps branded is abetter word) into horizontal wooden planks, reminiscent of the walls of thesorts of shacks that ghetto dwellers, from Kingston to Nairobi to Soweto,might build for themselves. The back of the sleeve, a gatefold, againdepicted Bob Marley openly, defiantly, unapologetically smoking a mar-ijuana spliff or joint. This time though, the portrait was in profile and, inkeeping with the group’s faces on the front of the sleeve, was dramaticallytone-eliminated, leaving only the salient features of the singers andmusicians.22

Notwithstanding the power and dynamism of the Catch a Fire andBurnin’ record sleeves, perhaps the most sophisticated Bob Marley andthe Wailers record sleeve to resonate with aesthetics of fire and brimstonewas Natty Dread of 1975. Designed by Tony Wright, the record sleeve,perhaps more than any other, brought forth Rastafarian warnings of theimminent destruction of Babylon and, indeed, the severest obligationsplaced on God’s chosen people, if not to ‘bun dung Babylon’, then atleast to flee it. It was on the Natty Dread record sleeve – possibly the mostunlikely of places – that another of John Martin’s brimstone, fire anddamnation paintings made an appearance. But perhaps the sleeve inquestion was not so unlikely after all. The record cover’s designer, TonyWright, offered this fascinating recollection,

I was asked to paint a portrait of Bob Marley for Natty Dread. I had the face painted in andwanted a ‘mayhem’ for a background but I was afraid the effect would be lightweight andcartoonish. In the ‘Tate Gallery’ in London I found a Victorian room with John Martin’s ‘TheGreat Day of His Wrath’. It was perfect. God destroying Babylon ... Using a classical paintingas the background gave the piece a weighty and serious quality.23

Hidden in plain sight, as a background to an impassive portrait of BobMarley, the singer’s face etched with measured resolve, there lay acropped detail of John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath. It was, as

246 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Wright recalled, the most perfect of fits. Other reggae record covers, ofrecordings by other artists, have sought to visualize the riot. Of particularrelevance was the cover of Dread Beat and Blood, a 1978 record referred to inthe notes to this text. The sleeve featured a stark but fetching pen and inkdrawing of a riot in a progress, as seen from the lines of the rioters. Themain protagonist, a young woman, bottle in hand, strides forward, withgreat confidence, about to stalk or confront the massed ranks of police whostand, battle-ready, some distance off. Alongside her, a much younger boyalso prepares to join battle. He too has a projectile in hand.

A number of British artists of African-Caribbean background have pro-duced key works that reference the nature and the occurrence of the riot inthe making of black Britain’s history.24 Frequently, the stock symbolism ofsuch artworks is the image of fire, or, more accurately perhaps, the imageof fire created by the flight of petrol bombs, the weapon often associatedwith rioters and rioting. This text looks at key works by three such practi-tioners, Donald Rodney (1961–98), Tam Joseph (b. 1947), and KimathiDonkor (b. 1965). In referencing the ‘riot’, artists such as these weresimultaneously referencing key milestones – albeit traumatic ones – inthe making of black Britain. (The ‘riots’ of Bristol in 1980 and those thatoccurred in other parts of the country, most notably Brixton, in 1981 had,for several decades thereafter, dominated the terms of reference for blackpeople’s presence in Britain.)

One such work is Tam Joseph’s The Sky at Night, made in response torioting that was, in turn, a response to the maiming of one black womanand the death of another, in the mid-1980s. On Saturday September 28,1985, Mrs Cherry Groce, a black woman, was shot and paralysed during apolice raid on her home in London. Groce was, allegedly, shot in her bed,by a member of a team of armed police officers who were looking for herson. Another, divergent account has it that,

a team of armed officers went to the home of Mrs Cherry Groce in Brixton, South London, toarrest her son, Michael, who was wanted for [allegations of] armed robbery. In fact, MichaelGroce, no longer lived there. The officers smashed down the door with a sledge-hammer andthen an inspector rushed in shouting ‘armed police’. Mrs Groce says the officer suddenlyrushed at her, pointing a gun at her. She tried to run back but he shot her. She is now paralysedand confined to a wheelchair.25

Groce’s maiming sparked rioting in the vicinity of Brixton, a district ofsouth London which had witnessed extensive rioting four years earlier, in1981. The sense of black Britain being a community under siege and on theunanswered receiving end of casual but deadly state-sanctioned violencewas further heightened within a matter of days of Groce’s horrific injuriesbeing sustained. On Sunday October 6, 1985, another black woman, MrsCynthia Jarrett, died of a heart attack during a police search of herTottenham home.26 (Again, it was allegations against her son that lay atthe centre of this police action.) During the mid-1980s there were manyother such personal tragedies that ultimately spoke of the black Britishpresence being a somewhat fractious or ill-at-ease one. It was during the‘rioting’ on the Broadwater Farm estate, sparked by news of Mrs Jarrett’sdeath, that PC Blakelock was isolated from his fellow police officers and set

Eddie Chambers 247

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

upon and killed by what was commonly referred to at the time, in the pressand media, as a ‘mob’.27 In keeping with the times, there was much aboutblack artists’ practice during the 1980s that inculcated and declared multi-ple senses of opposition, alienation and protest.

In 1986, Donald Rodney held an exhibition in London, at a venue knownas the Black-Art Gallery. The exhibition was titled the ‘AtrocityExhibition’, and the poster for it was a remarkable construction. Themain body of the poster featured a close-up image of a black youth’sexpressionless face, reproduced in the form of a stark, tone-eliminatedscreen print. Below the youth’s desolate eyes ran a rough white strip thatliterally obliterated much of the nose and cheeks of the boy’s face. On tothis white strip was printed the exhibition’s title and other necessaryinformation. But it was what was happening within the lower reaches ofthe poster that marked it out as exceptional. As mentioned earlier, it wasinjuries inflicted on one black woman and the fatality of another thatformed the core grievances that sparked riots in the mid-1980s.Memories of these riots were fresh in the mind of Rodney when he setabout making work for the exhibition, and, in time, making the posteritself. Groce’s tragedy, which had occurred about a year before Rodney’sexhibition, was all the more poignant because the only image of her thatwas circulated within the press and media in the aftermath of her injurieswas lifted from a wedding photograph. The cropped photograph, takenseveral decades earlier, showed Groce wearing her wedding day fineries.No other photograph of the hapless victim that may have existed wasmade available.

Reports of Groce’s injuries and Jarrett’s death sparked widespread riot-ing throughout the Brixton area of south London and the Tottenham areaof north London respectively. It was from the press coverage of these riotsthat Rodney gleaned his image, mentioned earlier, of the avenging ghettodefender. Across the lower part of Rodney’s poster, in a stark horizontalstrip, Rodney had placed torn, fragmented images of Cherry Groce, the lefthalf of her wedding day portrait running off the left-hand edge of theposter. Correspondingly, the right half of the same picture ran off the right-hand side of the poster. Literally and metaphorically torn in two, the areavacated (or the space opened up) became occupied by Rodney’s rioter,complete with his newspaper caption describing him (‘A youth brandishesa petrol bomb’). Rodney made it clear that for him the youth representedmilitancy, dedication and revolutionary consciousness. On either side ofthe petrol bomber Rodney had placed a quote by the Caribbean-bornwriter Neville Dawes (Neville had, on the poster, been spelt ‘Nevil’). Thequote read:

The day of transition is a long one that is the lesson of all conscious revolutions. Therevolutionary by the way, is not a man/woman with a gun aimed at a few priviledged [sic]people – that is a gangster, a bandit. A revolution begins when a whole people stand behind agun as a symbol and fact, and aim it against their suffering as a negative weapon, and towardstheir release as a positive machine, capable of moving mountains.

As far as Rodney was concerned, his ‘likkle ghetto yout [sic]’ was central tothe revolutionary vision spelled out by Dawes. And, in turn, what

248 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

happened to Cherry Groce and Cynthia Jarrett could act as a revolutionarycatalyst. Cause and effect, action and reaction. This was the first of anumber of times that Rodney’s revolutionary friend would make anappearance in Rodney’s work.

It was during this pivotal decade that so much highly effective andpenetrating work, commenting on a wide range of current social concerns,was produced by a number of black artists. Broadwater Farm was an areaof north London that was not much more than a mile or so away from thehome of artist Tam Joseph. Perhaps, given the geographical proximity ofthe scene of such cataclysmic events, Joseph responded to the bloodyevents of October 1985 by painting, in the same year, The Sky at Night, awork of astonishing clarity, gravity and sophistication (Figure 3). Thepainting was a depiction of the riot under way on Broadwater Farm,after dusk.28 It featured as its central component a daunting block offlats, at the base of and in front of which scattered groups of rioters hurledoccasional petrol bombs at assembled ranks of riot police. A dramatic andominous cleavage, in the form of a lift shaft or stairwell, separates the twowings of the block of flats, conveniently creating or reinforcing the twosides of the conflict or stand-off. At the base of one side of the buildingstand the police. Facing them, at the base of the other side of the building,stand the onlookers, among whom the police’s tormentors are presumablymingling. Given the drama of the scene depicted, The Sky at Night isnevertheless a quiet, almost understated painting. Though BroadwaterFarm is depicted, the block of flats shown could be almost anywhere inthe country, or could be located in other parts of the world, in cities scarredby bloated income differentials and urban deprivation. The architecturedepicted is reminiscent of the projects – the high-density inner-city hous-ing that is home to so many of the USA’s poorer black, Hispanic and otherlow-income families. On a smaller scale perhaps, the equivalent dwellingsin Jamaica, reflective of state attempts to provide accommodation for itspoorer citizens, were referred to or known as government housingschemes (or government yard as Bob Marley and the Wailers had sung in

Figure 3. Tam Joseph, The Skyat Night, acrylic on canvas,134 x 235 cm, 1985. # TamJoseph.

Eddie Chambers 249

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

their emotive classic of the mid-1970s, ‘No Woman No Cry’).29 Elsewherein the world, in the cities of France, such high-density housing – this timetraditionally located on the outskirts of cities – is known as, or referred toas, la banlieue.30 Housing estates, council estates, projects, housingschemes, la banlieue . . . in all instances, from Glasgow to Paris, Kingstonto London, the government housing strategy has often been to erect whatare often charmless brutalist boxes in which those with few housingoptions are forced to live literally on top of one another. Not only didhapless residents have to live cheek by jowl in such housing, there wereoften few amenities, such as good schools, good shops, good health care,libraries, parks or gardens in close proximity to these concrete jungles.

Another Caribbean-born artist to produce a compelling work comment-ing on the corrosive nature and effects of poor housing conditions wasTerry Boddie, from the island of Nevis, in the eastern Caribbean. His grim,yet hugely engaging, print Blueprint featured a dramatic juxtaposition ofan anonymous and grim tower block with a detail of the infamous ‘Plan ofa Slave Ship’ depicting similarly anonymous African bodies, packed likeso many non-human entities into every available space of the slave ship.Thus, Boddie challenges the viewer with a most startling thesis: that thecompartmentalizing of black people into wretched and miserable housingconditions is in so many ways reflective of the historical dehumanizing ofcaptured Africans during the centuries of horror that were the Atlanticslave trade.

Previously, the Wailers had bemoaned the formidable constraints of the‘concrete jungle’,31 and it was this sense of Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’being corralled into urban ghettoes that so exercised Joseph. The nocturnalnature of the scene depicted had the eerie effect of muting the sense ofinner-city unrest. None of the figures in the painting appeared overlyanimated. The groups of policemen and those intent on driving them outboth appeared almost lethargic, as if darkness or nightfall has slowed themdown. Given the media’s caricaturing of the ‘mob’, most people in The Skyat Night appear to be bystanders and, to all intents and purposes, observersof what is happening in their midst. Lights are on in a number of the flats,thereby illuminating in silhouette those who also are spectators or wit-nesses. The groups of police officers are dramatically depicted with fires –the results of petrol bombs – burning close by and in front of them andtheir riot shields. The light from the fires throws a number of the policeofficers into sharp and eerie relief, their dark outlines dramatically sil-houetted by the flames. Rather than a scene of bloodlust, destruction andmayhem, in its particularly restrained way The Sky at Night shows acommunity of exhausted and weary people, a few of whom, under coverof darkness and a familiarity with the cut-throughs and walkways of theestate, are seeking to do battle with the police.

In the wake of the ‘riots’ at the beginning of the decade, social depriva-tion and poor housing among black people had emerged as one of theunderlying factors of the disturbances. Here, in dramatic fashion, Josephpresented the viewer with the cause and the effect, the action and thereaction. With its reliance on the modernist grid, The Sky at Night was,perhaps more than anything else, a commentary on the failure of post-war

250 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

urban planning. High-density tower blocks and equivalent low-rise hous-ing were supposed to provide a brave new solution to both chronic hous-ing shortages and a need to move people out of dilapidated and inferiorhousing built some considerable time ago. But by the mid-1980s estatessuch as Broadwater Farm, though conceived as idyllic and desirable placesto live, now stood as near-conclusive evidence of the limitations, failuresand, indeed, the consequences of bad housing, particularly when unem-ployment and tales of police brutality and harassment were added to themix.

The titling of the piece has great significance, reminiscent as it is of thelong-running astronomy programme on BBC television, famously frontedby Sir Patrick Moore. First aired well over half a century ago, The Sky atNight was perhaps a comforting throwback to how television used to be,how life used to be, how society used to be, before all of these thingsbecame ever more mixed up and frenetic as the century wore on. In thatregard, the BBC’s The Sky at Night was a polar opposite, in more ways thanone, to Joseph’s painting of the same name. Moore, the holder of politicalviews associated with far-right policies, was in the 1970s chairman of agrouping known as the United Country Party, which, like the NationalFront, was anti-immigration. Moore was then involved in the UnitedCountry Party’s successor, known as the New Britain Party, which likeits predecessor campaigned to curb, halt or reverse immigration, at a timewhen immigration was particularly synonymous with people from theCommonwealth countries such as India, Pakistan and the countries ofAfrica and the Caribbean. Joseph’s reference to The Sky at Night repre-sented not only urban skirmishes after nightfall in north London, but alsothe anti-immigrant sentiments that were expressed by Patrick Moore at atime of particular racial violence meted out to black people in Britain. Andyet, aspects of the BBC’s The Sky at Night are indeed present withinJoseph’s painting of the same name. Above and behind the block of flatsthe night sky, complete with twinkling stars, is clearly visible.

Another artist to document, or recall, the riots that had occurred at theother end of London, in Brixton, a week earlier than the riots sparked bythe death of Cynthia Jarrett, was painter Kimathi Donkor. His ColdharbourLane 1985 was painted some two decades after the events themselves(Figure 4). In Donkor’s painting, the essential elements of Joseph’s TheSky at Night – the brutalist and brutalizing housing, the battles and theattempts to repel the neighbourhood’s invaders – were present. As men-tioned earlier, Groce’s maiming sparked rioting in the vicinity of Brixton, aregion of south London. BBC News (‘Riots in Brixton after police shooting’,1985) recalled that:

Riots have broken out on the streets of south London after a woman was shot and seriouslyinjured in a house search.

Armed officers raided a house in Brixton early this morning looking for a man in connectionwith a robbery.

Crowds began to gather outside the district’s police station when news broke the police hadaccidentally shot the man’s mother, Cherry Groce, in her bed with apparently no warning.

Local people had already been very critical of police tactics in Brixton and a mood of tensionexploded into violence as night fell.

Eddie Chambers 251

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Dozens of officers dressed in riot gear were injured as they were attacked by groups ofmainly black youths with bricks and wooden stakes.32

As with pretty much all mainstream media coverage of rioting, one needsperhaps to be careful in processing such coverage. While reports of riotingroutinely include tallies of police injured, no such consideration ofphysical frailty is generally extended to those members of the publiccaught up in disturbances not necessarily of their making. No tallies ofinjuries sustained by/inflicted on members of the public – either at thehands of rioters or at the hands of the police – are included in suchreporting. In similar regard, we perhaps ought to be sceptical of the pro-spect of a timely and fortuitous availability of medieval-sounding ‘woodenstakes’.

Along with Railton Road, Coldharbour Lane had over the course of themiddle to late twentieth century developed or acquired near-iconic statusas one of the original ‘frontlines’, indicating the contested territorywherein the police and black youth regularly clashed or otherwise cameinto confrontational contact with each other. On a map, Coldharbour Laneis one of the main thoroughfares in South London leading south-westwards from Camberwell into Brixton. Although the road is over amile long, with a mixture of residential, business and retail properties, thestretch of Coldharbour Lane depicted in Donkor’s painting centres on afew blocks, not too far from Brixton Market and nearby shops, bars andrestaurants, where Coldharbour Lane meets Acre Lane in central Brixton.Donkor’s painting recalls a time when Brixton was very much, and verymuch regarded as, a black (as in distinctly African-Caribbean) neighbour-hood. True to the ‘frontline’ nature of Coldharbour Lane, Donkor’s paint-ing shows three ghetto defenders, each in various stages of hurling rocks atthe massed ranks of their tormentors, located outside the frame of the

Figure 4. Kimathi Donkor,Coldharbour Lane 1985, oil oncanvas, 152 x 153 cm, 2005.# Kimathi Donkor.

252 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

canvas some distance to the right of the depicted rock-throwers. In point offact, we do not know for certain what the first rioter is about to hurl, as hishand/weapon are located beyond the left side of the artist’s canvas. Rock,half-brick, petrol bomb, whatever the weapon, the first rioter, and the oneclosest to us, is about to let it fly. As something of a dramatic backdrop tothe group of three, there stands an anonymous housing block, its facade ofmuted colour effectively pock-marked by what seem to be impossiblysmall windows, making the building more reminiscent of a prison, or alow-rent Ministry of Truth33 building, rather than a building of homes inwhich Londoners are supposed to live.

Reminiscent of images of rock-throwing young Palestinians of theIntafada, some of Donkor’s urban warriors are at pains to mask their faces,to prevent subsequent identification by police photographers and surveil-lance cameras, and the judicial and extra-judicial retribution that wouldcome with such identification. Only the face of the third figure is visible,though he nevertheless wears the traditional clothing of the disaffectedghetto dweller, the hoodie. Like The Sky at Night, Coldharbour Lane 1985consciously avoids (re)creating a scene of bloodlust, wanton destructionand mayhem. And, like Joseph’s painting, Donkor’s, in its particularlyrestrained way, shows a small group of ghetto defenders, seeking to joinrighteous battle with the uniformed aggressors who have come into theirmidst and invaded black territory in the most brutal and rudest of ways.Coldharbour Lane 1985 is characteristic of Donkor’s style of painting. Hefearlessly tackles key, dramatic, monumental moments of African diasporahistory, but does so with a painterly preciseness that borders on aestheticfrugality. Despite the animated scene depicted, Coldharbour Lane 1985 reso-nates with an almost deafening silence, almost as if the riot is taking placewith the environmental volume turned right down or muted altogether. Assuch, the painting stands in marked and salutary contrast to the shrill,hysterical and sensationalist tones that normally accompany televisionreports of urban disturbances, reports that, by their nature, offer more inthe way of heat than light, on the causes and anatomies of a riot.

Notes

1 As with a great many other riots, the riots that took place in certain English cities in the summer of 2011were subject to all manner of theories by media pundits and others as to why they had happened. Therewas, however, one unavoidable truth: the riots started with a grievance, the central contributory factorbeing the shooting dead by armed police of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man,on August 4, 2011, in circumstances probably best described as unclear. Initially, rioting grew out of apalpable sense of frustration, on the part of certain people, because the community of Duggan’s friends,family and neighbours had been unable to secure from the police adequate or satisfactory responses totheir respectful and reasonable demands for some sort of immediate explanation. The atmosphere ofquestioning and suspicion was perhaps needlessly stoked by the familiar release of untruths andmisinformation in the immediate wake of Duggan’s death. Chief among these untruths was the claim,peddled by an obliging media, that Duggan was involved in some sort of shoot-out with the police.Believing themselves to be stonewalled, the anger of Duggan’s community of friends, relations andneighbours turned to frustration, and out of this frustration grew random acts of destruction by certainindividuals not necessarily connected with the spontaneous protest that erupted in the wake ofDuggan’s shooting. These random acts of arson quickly spread first through Tottenham, then throughother areas of the capital, then through other areas of the country. The shooting of Mark Duggan isapparently the subject of several formal investigations and, to date, no definitive explanation has beenforthcoming.

2 I make mention of mainland Britain, to distinguish such rioting from that which has taken/which takesplace in the cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry, in which predominantly younger people fromboth sides of the sectarian divide have done battle with the police of the province. Within Britain itself,

Eddie Chambers 253

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

towns in the north of England have periodically witnessed rioting by Asian youth. According toDominic Casciani, community affairs reporter, BBC News website, ‘In the summer of 2001, a number ofnorthern towns in England erupted in violent clashes predominantly sparked by racial tensions, mixed,to some extent, with orchestrated rivalries between criminal gangs. ‘Oldham, Burnley and Bradfordexperienced violence which saw hundreds of young Asian men (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) take to thestreets.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5032166.stm (accessed May 25, 2012).

3 Mercer,: Welcome to the Jungle, 178.

4 Kettle and Hodges, Uprising!

5 Ibid., 10.

6 After the Riots: The Final Report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel. The panel (whose memberswere Darra Singh OBE, Simon Marcus, Heather Rabbatts CBE and Maeve Sherlock OBE) released itsreport on March 28, 2012.

7 For more on John Martin, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/08/john-martin-painting-the-apocalypse.

8 ‘Share the Riches’ appeared on several CDs by Jamaican reggae group Culture, including Culture: ChantDown Babylon, Crucial Roots Tunes, 1989–1999, Reggae Collectables label, 1999.

9 Quoted in Sivanandan, A Different Hunger.

10 Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘All Wi Doin is Defendin’, from Dread Beat an’ Blood, the first long-playing recordof poetry released by this British, Jamaican-born poet, then styling himself ‘Poet and the Roots’ (FrontLine Records/Virgin Records, released in 1978). According to Wikipedia, ‘Johnson was the first personto accurately describe the situation of the black British youth in the inner cities in the late 1970s andearly 1980s. This theme runs through most of the songs on this and his other albums but it particularlyevident in the last vocal song on the album ‘‘All Wi Doin’ Is Defendin’’’ which it is remarkably prescientas it foresees the Brixton riot (1981) in some detail and justifies it before it had even happened. All mediacommentators and politicians were shocked by this event. Not Linton Kwesi Johnson. Lyrics include‘‘Send in the riot squad quick because we’re running wild’’ ‘‘All we need are bottles and bricks andsticks’’ and these were indeed the principal weapons used by the 1981 rioters. ‘‘All Wi Doin’ isDefendin’ so get ready for war!’’ for Johnson was correct in seeing the forthcoming riot as an essentiallydefensive act by the black youth of Brixton after years of victimisation by the police.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Beat_an%27_Blood (accessed June 4, 2012).

11 Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Bass Culture’, the title track of a long-playing record by Linton Kwesi Johnson(Island Records, 1980). In 1976, during the course of the annual Notting Hill Festival, violent streetbattles had erupted between black youth and the police in the vicinity of the carnival. But it was therioting in St Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980 (plus major eruptions the following year in Brixton and elsewhere)that emphatically declared the arrival of the dissatisfied urban-dwelling ghetto youth. These wereheady days. These years, the late 1970s and early 1980s, made up one of the most politically, culturallyand racially charged periods of black British history.

12 Solomos and Black, Race, Politics and Social Change, 81–2.

13 ‘Riots in England: The fire this time/The worst rioting in decades will cost the country more thanmoney’, The Economist, August 13, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21525945 (accessed May27, 2012).

14 Though others have laid claim to it, the phrase is said to have originated with H. ‘Rap’ Brown, StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) national director, who coined the phrase when race riotserupted in the mid-1960s. See Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, 166.

15 ‘77’ written by Michael Dan, Barry Ford and Winston Bennett and performed by Merger on the long-playing record Exiles in a Babylon (Sun Star Muzik, 1977).

16 Sheridan, Soul Rebel, 44.

17 Donald Rodney in conversation with Lubaina Himid, State of the Art, Illuminations Films, Channel 4,1986.

18 A number of writers have attempted to detail various aspects of the cultural, social, economic andpolitical relations of reggae, both in Jamaica and abroad and, importantly, including recentdevelopments in reggae dancehall (in which the political subtexts are no less powerfully present in bothcommercial and ‘slack’ as well as so-called ‘conscious’ exponents – if possibly more ambivalently withrespect to contemporary conditions). See for example, Potash, Reggae, Rasta, Revolution; Partridge, Dubin Babylon; Foster, Roots Rock Reggae; Bradley, Bass Culture.

19 Compelling evidence of this exists in the form of An England Story: The Culture of the MC in the UK 1984–2008, Soul Jazz Records, 2008.

20 Newsnight, August 12, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517 (accessed September 30, 2012).

21 One of the most celebrated songs on the album was ‘Slave Driver’, with its haunting music and pressinglyrics that located the plight of the Jamaican sufferer in the legacy of slavery: ‘Slave Driver, your table isturned. Catch a fire, you’re gonna get burned.’ .

22 The portrait of Marley, in profile, on the record’s back cover was from a photograph by EstherAnderson. The album design for Burnin’ was by Visualeyes.

23 http://www.bobmarleymagazine.com/2011/11/interview-with-tony-wright/ (accessed May 28,2012).

254 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

24 Substantial publications on black British artists’ practice remain something of a rarity, but see, forexample, Piper, Relocating the Remains, and Rodney, Doublethink.

25 The Times, January 16, 1987, quoted in Institute of Race Relations, Policing against Black People, 26.

26 The scene of Cynthia Jarrett’s tragic death was memorably recreated by Kimathi Donkor, one of theartists discussed in this text, in his painting Madonna Metropolitan (2005, oil on linen, 152 x 152cm).Madonna Metropolitan depicted a collapsed and dying Cynthia Jarrett, being attended to by one of herdistressed daughters, while all around them police officers continued to turn the domestic room upsidedown, in their search for heaven knows what. For good measure, one of the officers aggressivelyremonstrates with the daughter, jabbing his finger menacingly in her direction, even while life drainsfrom the heart attack victim.

27 For a discussion of these ‘riots’, see Rose, A Climate of Fear. For more on the Broadwater Farm riots, seeDabydeen, Gilmore and Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British Culture, 71–2.

28 Ibid.

29 ‘No Woman No Cry’, written by V. Ford, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Natty Dread, Island Records,1974.

30 Tam Joseph was not the only artist interested in these fractured and fractious urban environments.Mohamed Bourouissa, an Algerian-born photographer, has recently emerged as an image-makerwhose locations draw heavily on la banlieue. Magali Jauffret, commenting on Bourouissa, noted that hewas an artist ‘who has chosen to work on France’s ghetto-like suburbs’. Jauffret, ‘The Suburbs as VisualObject’.

31 ‘Concrete Jungle’, written by Bob Marley, performed by the Wailers, Catch A Fire, Island Records, 1973.

32 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/28/newsid_2540000/2540397.stm(accessed May 25, 2012).

33 The Ministry of Truth was where Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s NineteenEighty-Four, worked. In the book, it is described as an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering whiteconcrete rising some 300 metres into the air, containing in excess of 3000 rooms above ground level. Toemphasize the sinister and terror-laden function of the Ministry of Truth, on the outside wall of thebuilding there appeared three slogans of the Party: ‘WAR IS PEACE’, ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ and‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’.

Bibliography

Bradley, Lloyd, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Harmondsworth: Penguin,2001.

Dabydeen, David, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion toBlack British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Dierenfield, Bruce J., The Civil Rights Movement. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004.Foster, Chuck, Roots Rock Reggae: The Oral History of Reggae Music from Ska to

Dancehall. Lakewood, NJ: BPI Communications, 1999.Institute of Race Relations, Policing against Black People. London: IRR, 1987.Jauffret, Magali, ’The Suburbs as Visual Object’, in Mohamed Bourouissa:

Peripherique: ’The Suburbs as Visual Object’, exhibition catalogue, Galeriemunicipale du chateau d’Eau, October 1, 2008.

Kettle, Martin and Lucy Hodges, Uprising! The Police, the People and the Riots inBritain’s Cities. London: Pan, 1982.

Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Partridge, Christopher, Dub in Babylon: The Emergence and Influence of Dub Reggae inJamaica and Britain in the 1970s. London: Equinox, 2010.

Piper, Keith, Relocating the Remains, London: INIVA, 1997.Potash, Chris, Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub. New York:

Schirmer Books, 1997.Rodney, Donald, Doublethink, London: Autograph, 2003.Rose, David, Climate of Fear. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.Sheridan, Maureen, Soul Rebel: The Stories Behind Every Bob Marley Song, 1962–1981.

New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.Sivanandan, A., A Different Hunger, London: Pluto Press, 1982.Solomos, John and Les Black, Race, Politics and Social Change. London: Routledge,

1995.

Eddie Chambers 255

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Eddie Chambers is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin,where he teaches classes and seminars on art history of the African Diaspora.Chambers’ book Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent BlackArtists in Britain (Rodopi Editions, Amsterdam and New York) appeared in 2012.Reflecting Chambers’ interest in black-British artists, the book addresses recentdevelopments in the profile of black-British artists, in an era in which British arthas come to be dominated by the so-called yBa (young British artists) generation. In2012 Chambers had an essay (An Inglan Story, An Inglan History) in the catalogueto accompany the autumn 2012 exhibition of one of the UK’s most importantphotographers of black Britain, Vanley Burke, at mac – Midland Arts Centre – inBirmingham. Chambers also had an essay (‘Who’d a Thought It?’) on the interplaybetween the work of Frida Kahlo and black-British artist Donald Rodney published ina recent issue of Wasafiri. His current book project is a history of black artists inBritain from the mid-20th Century onwards (I.B. Tauris, London). At the CollegeArt Association in 2014, Eddie Chambers will be co-chairing a panel on ‘Visualizingthe Riot’.

256 reading the riot act

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

21:

26 0

2 N

ovem

ber

2014