[music]
[LS] Lockdown has transformed out cities.
They look, sound and smell, and even taste
different over the last few months.
Historically cities have been places of encounter
and movement and friction and now they stand
still.
Over the last few weeks there are a few people
I wanted to talk more about our cities and
I’m here with Les Back, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, ethnographer, teacher, mensch,
good friend.
In 2018 you published a book which you co-wrote
with Shamser Sinha and also with a lot of
other people, called Migrant City that came
out with Routledge.
It was a kind of collaborative ethnography
of the life of migration in London.
What is happening to the city now?
What does it look like?
What does it taste like?
What kind of encounters are happening?
[LB] Well you know I think it is a really
complicated mixture of things in a way.
Some of the important points that we wanted
to make in the book about the city as a place
where bordering and immigration control kind
of move into the spaces of everyday life.
That I think in the kind of post Covid 19
world may be becoming even more toxic and
even more pressing and even more tightly controlled,
so that’s one side of how it feels like.
But on the other side, there are other aspects
of the city which I think have come to life
even in this very strange moment, you know,
where there’s the shudder of fear and risk
that’s reverberating through the city.
But also it is true to say that some of the
resources that a multicultural city contains
have become even more precious in our time.
Just simple things like getting food and the
provision of food.
I haven’t stood……
I live in South East London and I haven’t
stood in a long queue in a supermarket because
affordable food is available within walking
distance practically anywhere in this corner
of London you know.
And it has really made me feel much more proud
actually and mindful you know of the sort
of resources that multicultural economies
produce, the accessibility and openness of
them.
It means you have to kind of shop in an old
school way really, different shops and different
places, but those largely Black and minority
ethnic economies are serving this city and
keeping it going actually.
[LS] Going back to the first point about surveillance
actually, when there was talk on, you know,
having the contact App so everyone would know
where we were, I said, and I can remember
talking with you and I think it is in the
book too, of what it was like to be deported
and have the Home Office know exactly where
you were, and I remember you telling me the
story about people literally being deported
on the plane and they would hear their phone
ping and there would be a text message from
the Home Office saying: ‘enjoy your flight’.
[LB] Indeed that happened.
[LS] And now that is being proposed for all
of us.
[LB] Well exactly, so that sort of sense of
the risk of that, you know, I really think
the post Covid 19 environment might license
those kinds of forms of micro-bordering and
surveillance.
Nira Yuval Davis talks about it as kind of
micro-bordering.
I think that’s right and I think there’s
a deep risk in this kind of moment where things
are really in the balance and that we might
be moving to a moment where hate is being
licensed and blame is being licensed at the
same time as the kind of the cracking down
of those forms of surveillance become tighter
in the name of necessity, in the name of safety,
in the name of protection.
Of course there are things that are important
about observing the strategies that will help
us be healthy together in overcrowded places.
But it feels like, in a way, the work that
you’ve always done about the combination,
if you like, about the humanities and the
literacy sensibility and a political and sociological
one is even more important because language
really matters I think at this moment, perhaps
as much as any other moment actually.
LS: Yes, it is trying to put it as Bonnie
Honig put it in a think piece ‘putting the
social back into social distancing’ and
it seems like it has gone two ways.
One is the distancing and control and the
dehumanisation and the other is people rediscovering,
or using the resources they already have of
forms of sociality that aren’t registered,
or are being slowly registered now because
they’re becoming a necessity because you
need to eat and you need to be able to afford
to eat – a lot of people are taking a lot
of hits.
But it has occurred to me over the last couple
of days that part of the work that you and
I have done together over the last ten years
is, in some ways is in some ways called the
refugee crisis or questions about migration
and then Grenfell and Covid 19 are all part
of the same story.
It is the same kind of total control, language
of hate versus citizen to citizen humanitarianism
versus different forms of neighbourliness,
always difficult, always problematic but often
joyous forms of solidarity.
But Covid doesn’t seem to be a huge break,
it seems to be a continuation of something
that some of us have been seeing, certainly
over the last ten years.
Would you agree with that?
[LB] I absolutely agree with that.
On the one hand it is the huge challenge of
this moment in that it deepens….. and I
think you know the language is so telling
– fight, this kind of militaristic language,
the kind of melancholic return to the World
War Two spirit and the Blitz and all that
stuff.
It is completely reanimating that and politicians
do it in a kind of post Brexit environment
in a very sort of premeditated way it seems
to me but is so entirely unhelpful when it
comes to what it means to try and live through
this crisis and live with each other and together,
through it.
I just feel like those two forces, I mean
Paul Gilroy puts it so brilliantly when he
says the post Colonial melancholia, there’s
the Churchillian rhetoric of the exception
nature of this enduring people on the one
hand and then on the other hand there is the
possibility of reimagining what convivial
life might be in the midst of multicultural
cities like London, you know, and I think
those two things are at play.
I’ve always really thought that the relationship
between those two forces is a paradoxical
one, not necessarily one that can easily be
resolved.
Most of the time it feels like we’re living
with both of those forces that are kind of
pulling away at each other in a way that means
that there isn’t a hope for a resolution
but there is the presence of that and tension
if you like.
[LS] I suppose as a place it is becoming more
visible both in Birmingham and I think in
South London is around the NHS because it
is Black people, it is Asian people who are
putting themselves in the front line visibly
and being killed in the front line, if we
are going to use the language of the front
line, so the children of migrants and migrants
themselves and it is very hard to pretend
it is anything other than these people who
are saving lives, so I think the messaging
around the media, you can kind of see and
kind of perplexity of what to do with this,
because those two narratives are coming together
at that moment and they’re not the usual
ones.
[LB] Yes, that’s so true.
I’ve always thought that the National Health
Service is a good place to think about the
state of the nation actually.
Yasmin Gunaratnam, one of my colleagues at
Goldsmiths has written a really beautiful
and important piece called ‘When doctors
die’ which I think makes the case very,
very, very urgently for rethinking what that
means, you know, who is doing the care and
what happens when you replace the language
of worry and phobia and melancholia with a
language of care and I think…
I’m always struck by it, any time I walk
into a hospital or speak to people who work
in the NHS, what care means, how challenging
it is, what it means to care for people with
very different cultural heritages and cultural
experiences in a waiting room and that to
me again that is something that is a resource
in our time that people are able to do that
and risk their lives doing it actually, risk
their lives for care, not for a fight, for
care.
[LS] Yes and there’s a very different vocabulary
that we don’t often use very much that goes
with that, when we’re used to psychological
and psychoanalytical categories like phobia,
melancholia, mourning but there’s the language
of gratitude, love, preparation, care that
may be needs to come back into conversation.
[LB] Well I’ve always thought that Lyndsey
and it will be no surprise to you as we’ve
talked about it so much but I just really
feel that that’s what is at stake because
it is not just words as decorative adornment
you know.
It is about finding a vocabulary that can
create a different cast of mind, and not just
a cast of mind but also that can shape action
as well, shape our relations to each other
and a different sense of the social actually
and I think you are absolutely right and that
point about putting the social into social
isolation is really well made.
