Organised Forgetting and Poetic Testimony: Four Landmark Moments in Post-War British History

Walker, Jodie and Pearce, Lynne and Skeggs, Beverley (2025) Organised Forgetting and Poetic Testimony: Four Landmark Moments in Post-War British History. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores four watershed moments in recent British history through debates centring on institutional silencing and the manufacturing of an ‘organised forgetting’. Focusing on the testimonial poetry produced in response to these four landmark events, the thesis argues for the representational possibilities of the form, contending that the texts concerned create an oppositional cultural space that challenges political obfuscation. Presented chronologically, the second chapter – following the Introduction – examines the 1984 ‘Battle of Orgreave’, exploring the ‘violence of representation’ associated with this flash point in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, with a particular focus on the concept of the ‘right to write’. The third chapter focuses on the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, questioning the ethical responsibilities involved in reading and writing trauma, and what it might mean to bear witness as a reader. The penultimate chapter examines the 2011 English riots, analysing rap and grime music as a cultural response to the protests and also as a form of ‘ethnographic poetry’. The final chapter explores the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, focusing on the ‘slow violence’ associated with the neglect of social housing provision in Britain, and the repurposing of silence as voice. Taken together, the four events investigated here may therefore be seen to function as ruptures in the social contract between the state and its people, and speak to the betrayal of the tenets of the post-war welfare state. Attending closely to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of the texts alongside their powerful testimonial function, there is a particular focus on the ‘slow violence’ of the everyday set against the ‘spectacular’ violence of the events themselves and their media representation; the thesis thus interrogates the complex status of an extraordinary archive of writing both in terms of its artistic expression and as a cultural intervention.