Mnemonic Traces of Grenfell - Mediating Cultural Memories and Literary Experimentation in Contemporary Black British Writing
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2025-06-30
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en
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Abstract
On 14 June 2017, a twenty-four-storey tower block in a multicultural corner of North West
London became engulfed with thick black flames, resulting in the loss of seventy-two lives
under violent circumstances. The Grenfell Tower disaster, termed the deadliest fire in Britain’s
living memory, has since generated a wide range of critical responses across society and culture
while debates around reparative justice reverberate. As images of the burnt-out shell of the
brutalist building as a visceral site of memory have been ingrained in the collective
consciousness, the emerging narrative around the fire has permeated in an especially diverse
fashion across the writings by British authors of African and Caribbean descent. Marking the
eighth anniversary of the tragic event, this thesis examines a myriad of such mnemonic traces
by analysing how works of contemporary Black British writing engage with and deploy
formally innovative modes of representation in order to cultivate cultural memories of Grenfell
through an affective lens. Focusing on the underexplored interplay between remembrance and
generic experimentation, specific medial forms across fiction, poetry and drama are
investigated for their salient role in fostering processes of witnessing alongside socio-political
discussions around contested issues of identity politics and belonging. This perspective on the
mediation of memorial practices helps to establish how a network of writers are ‘investing’ in
particular stories and motifs to keep memories of the fire tangible on a socio-cultural level.
Establishing a trans-medial account of various critical engagements with Grenfell in
contemporary Black British literature, this thesis brings together interdisciplinary insights from
cultural memory studies and postcolonial literary criticism to show how remembrance functions
as an ongoing, lived activity that sustains activist efforts through different modes or levels of
mediation. It thereby focuses on the expression of the cultural politics of memorialisation across
different medial boundaries in a generically diverse corpus, including Diana Evans’ realist
novel A House for Alice (2023), Jay Bernard’s multimodal poetry volume Surge (2019), Potent
Whisper’s collection of performance poetry The Rhyming Guide to Grenfell Britain (2018) and
George the Poet’s spoken-word radio drama “Grenfell II” (2019). The selected works are shown
to engage with hypermediacy as they reinvent, intersect and combine experimental forms while
amplifying silenced voices in a larger socio-political framework. In parallel to how authors can
be found to pinpoint the aesthetic affordances of the composition of their work, their texts also
incorporate a documentary lens that enables a creative distance to be maintained as the reader
is interpolated into an interpretative position of witnessing. Such observations point to the
recurring employment of self-reflexive, documentary, multimodal and generically hybrid forms
of representation as notable ways to shape and frame cultural memories of Grenfell while
tapping into activist discourses. In mapping a variety of experimental literary responses to the
disaster, this thesis thus identifies Black British writing as a rich cultural archive that, due to its
generic diversities, is a promising lens to identify how authors inflect formal innovation with
activist and mnemonic practices.
Keywords: Grenfell Tower fire, Black British literature, genre, cultural memory, activism,
mediation, self-reflexivity, multimodality, experimental writing, identity politics, belonging.
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