Race, Cultural Production and Urban Multiculture: Grenfell, Race and Institutional Neglect in Music Video

This presentation compares two music videos co-authored by filmmaker Fahim Alam and musician Lowkey, drawing two main strands of argument. Firstly, I argue that the respective sonic and visual contributions of Lowkey and Alam operate in tandem in these music videos – in specifically audiovisual terms – to offer creative responses to the Grenfell Tower Tragedy, critiquing of austerity’s racist, neoliberal undertones while, simultaneously, disrupting the focus on visual communication which oftentimes shapes discussions of contemporary diasporic media forms at the expense of the sonic. Secondly, I argue that the creative outputs here proffered by Lowkey and Alam attempt to intervene within the shifting discussions about austerity in the aftermath of the Grenfell Fire by consciously emphasising how the (oftentimes underexplored) racial dimensions underpinning “everyday experiences” of UK-based austerity contribute to manifestations of institutional violence on the scale of the Grenfell Tragedy.

Drawing from Ed Kiely and Rosalie Warnock’s theorisation of ‘institutional neglect’ and their attempts “to extend and nuance” preceding conceptualisations of austerity’s violence, I focus on the disruption of Grenfell survivors’ combined sense of worth as British citizens as a result of the government’s ongoing lack of meaningful action in the aftermath of the fire. At the same time, by presenting to these afflicted communities an alternative mode of grassroots solidarity which does not rely on government endorsement or official authorisation, I posit that the sophisticated (in)congruities which nuance the sonic and visual elements of the Ghosts of Grenfell and Ghosts of Grenfell II music videos signal towards the complicated ways in which imperial legacies protractedly haunt (post)colonial contexts long after colonialism’s formal endpoint(s), thereby articulating how violent manifestations of ‘institutional neglect’ in modern Britain remain in certain ways entangled with moments of brutality that shaped the country’s past.