Events

Guest Speaker: Professor Henrique Carvalho, Warwick Law School

Title: (Work-In-Progress) 'Love, Hate, Beauty and Justice: Affective and Aesthetic Exonomies of UK Drill and its Criminalisation'

Abstract: This paper offers a cultural-legal examination of UK Drill – a genre of drill music, a Black music subculture – contrasting its cultural significance and public popularity – particularly among young people – with its institutional and legal framing as a dangerous practice associated with youth and gang violence and its relation to criminalising legal processes and practices. The paper deploys two interrelated conceptual frames of analysis: first, it examines the ambivalent set of emotions that are articulated around public and legal representations of UK Drill - including love for drill as a musical genre and cultural practice, to hate for it as a marker of dangerousness and an index of violence. This framework is then juxtaposed with an aesthetic analysis of the music and its context which critically discusses the relation between beauty, politics and justice. The paper then suggests that, through a deeper cultural understanding of UK Drill, its cultural construction can be seen to feed into at least two contrasting ideas and images of justice: one which is primarily grounded on hate and hostility, inherently exclusionary, and geared towards punitive justice; and one which, through an inclusive reading of pain and resistance in UK Drill music and culture, is grounded on love and solidarity, and can thus potentially ground alternative, more wholesome and socially concrete approaches to justice.