Less Violent But No Less Visible

Abstract

This dissertation compares that state-sponsored tactic of criminalization implemented against both the Black community of Brixton and the republican community of Belfast throughout the 1970s, arguing that both minority groups were criminalized in an attempt to end the ‘crisis of hegemony’ faced by the British government during the post-war decline of empire. While this process of criminalization was implemented via different legislative methods and with different ideologies, racial in Brixton and ethno-sectarian in Belfast, the government used these negative ideologies to create a specific narrative that supported the implementation of discriminatory policing policies against these marginalized groups. Both the Black and republican communities fought against this narrative of criminalization, instead highlighting parallel counter-narratives which contended that discriminatory governing and over-policing were negative symptoms of Britain’s enduring colonial legacy and a detriment to the minority populations of the United Kingdom. Tensions between the state-sponsored police and these marginalized communities exploded in 1981 with the uprising in Brixton and the hunger strike in Belfast. Members of both minority communities viewed these events as attempts to combat state discriminatory policies, but the British government viewed these violent events as proof of the criminality of these minority groups. Examining the creation and use of community murals in both Brixton and Belfast after 1981, this dissertation argues that murals became a less violent, but no less visible tool to combat the narrative of criminalization. As a type of artwork specifically designed for marginalized communities to challenge spatial and visual hegemony, community murals in these locations created large public canvases with which disenfranchised citizens could display their own visual representation – a representation to offset the negative imagery being portrayed by the British government and mainstream media. Minority groups in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland used these community artworks as subversive tools to positively display their marginalized cultures and their counter-narrative of discriminatory policies throughout the 1980s. While created via different artistic and collaborative methods, community murals in Brixton and Belfast became a tool used by both minority groups to combat the negative impacts of the shared criminalization that stemmed from a mutual colonial history.