The Zero-Hour City

Writing London in the End Times

Bibliographic Data

ID13100729
AuthorsEd Charlton (0000-0001-7563-9472, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume6
Issue2
Pages280-294
Publication date2020-07-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2020.1768880
OpenAlexW3041233501
LanguageEN
References cited30

The zero-hour arguably marks much more than a form of precarious employment. Making liquid the injustice of the here and now, it also postpones any reckoning with the temporal, spatial and, more often, racial dispossessions of a city like London in this, its contemporary neoliberal progress. In this article, I offer up a reading of the zero-hour as it emerges within the city’s much longer end time imagination. But I also attempt to trace an immanent critique of this tradition. Turning to the black British poet D.S. Marriott and his latest collection, Duppies (2018 Marriott, D. S. 2018. Duppies. Oakland, CA: Commune Editions. [Google Scholar]), which is best characterized as an elegy for the end of Grime, this article theorizes the possibility for a melancholy writing of London that might resist its many end time dispossessions

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Elegy · Injustice · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Zero (linguistics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Night-time city culture · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

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