After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response

The fire in Grenfell Tower that killed 72 people in June 2017 was the most deadly and preventable disaster in contemporary British history. There have been many responses to the catastrophe, from local communities and activists, journalists and academics. This volume presents narratives which acknowledge that the fire was no unforeseeable accident but the result of a long history of violence. This violence takes many forms, including the legacy and continued logic of colonialism, racism, including anti-muslim racism, the international politics of hostility to migration, contemporary imperialist war, the marketization of social provision and global austerity politics, and the negligence and malfeasance of multinational contractors. The precarious lives and deaths of Grenfell Tower residents showed them to be subjects of complex forms of power and revealed the long struggle of the North Kensington community against denigration and neglect. On the second anniversary of the fire, this volume brings together activists, artists and academics from a variety of disciplines, drawing on long histories of resistance against state and private forms of power and violence, eliciting their own response and their critical analysis of legal, media, community and government responses. How can we react to the violence of Grenfell? What are the futures for resistance and justice in the face of multifaceted and diffuse power and violence? And without remedy for these issues, are we really ‘after’ Grenfell?