Countering institutional silencing: the political agency of working class poetry in reconstructing Britain's social imaginary, 1984-present

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My research interests lie in a concept I term an 'organised forgetting', the manufacturing of a shared public memory by the dominant ideological apparatus, and literature's role in working to create and sustain this. In examining literary accounts of pivotal cultural and political events, my concern is with who is permitted to speak, or more pertinently, who is being heard. I am interested in issues of canon formation and how working class literary representations of events (particularly post-war British watershed moments) are both produced and received. My interests broadly align with both Guillory's investigative Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) and Pearce et al's Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture (2013), and the ways in which they consider the politics of the literary canon. My research aim, then, is to explore how dominant discourses and a traditional canon govern what is publicly and collectively remembered of four pivotal events: the UK Miners' Strike, 1984-5; the Hillsborough Disaster, 1989; the 2011 London Riots; and the 2017Grenfell Tower fire. Using Goodridge and Keegan's definition of working class writing as that 'which is produced by individuals who have not enjoyed social, economic and educational advantages', I argue that these writings can function as disruptivehistories of watershed moments (Goodridge and Keegan, 2017: 1). These texts work against and expose dominant discourses and the ongoing cultural and literary obfuscation of events, instead creating unsanctioned accounts that oftencontradict received histories.My thesis will focus particularly on working class poetry -Audre Lorde's idea that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' can here point to the reimagining of form, language, and what poetry 'ought' to look like as necessary strategies with which to mediate reality differently (Lorde, 2017: 89). I expand the traditional parameters of poetry to encompass anything that uses poetic form, however loosely, for several reasons: firstly, it is the quickest literary form to produce, allowing work to be born almost immediately from the events it speaks of. Secondly, poetry's oral heritage, its ties to song, chant and protest, and its contemporary links to rap, mean the poetic form has an innate place within working class culture that spans centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which a form that is often carefully guarded as a bastion of 'high culture' can be co-opted and re-purposed to political ends.