Chapter 4 covers the period from the Civil War/War of Three Kingdoms to the Restoration. It argues that it is important that the Civil War is explored in terms of class conflict because of the varied and radical ideas that were generated, which either saw the war in terms of social strife, or, more frequently, saw it as an opportunity to eradicate such problems and establish or restore a more egalitarian order. The Levellers sought to establish new social and political principles that would facilitate equality. Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers attacked enclosure and the appropriation of the common land, hoping and believing that their social experiments would inaugurate a return to the values that had been lost since the Norman Conquest. Their Royalist opponents, Isaac Walton and Robert Herrick, shared the Diggers’ belief in the need for a common culture based on agrarian values, while urban radicals such as John Milton had a somewhat elastic representation of the ‘people’, one that elided thinking about class. John Bunyan was another critic of the commercialization of society and the disappearance of common rights and land. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the writings of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn. While Rochester is relatively thoughtful about gender differences, he is blind to issues of class. Behn desires the equality of the sexes in her erotic poetry, but a re-establishment of a hierarchical social order in her novel, Oronooko.

This chapter explores the fluid, adaptable nature of performance poetry and looks at potential responses to the disruption caused by the pandemic. The chapter documents the Nottingham spoken-word culture and positions it within wider debates about class, literary value and the physicality of the performance. I study the work of Michelle ‘Mother’ Hubbard – a Nottingham poet of dual Irish and Jamaican heritage – to understand how grassroots literature carves out its own spaces; how various forms of literary value are ascribed; and to examine the complex networks of gatekeepers and valuing communities which constitute contemporary performance poetry cultures in Nottingham. Poetry has often been the preserve of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, considered an exclusive form of high art which requires middle-class credentials, such as a degree education or Received Pronunciation, in order to gain access. This chapter uses the seismic disruption of COVID-19 to map a new, more egalitarian ‘public sphere’, in which democratic principles of curation and delivery enable increasingly broad and diverse audiences to access the art form.

Chapter 8 examines the extent to which Midlands writers such as Meera Syal, Sathnam Sanghera and Huma Qureshi have been read in a fetishising context for marketing purposes. The title quote ‘Pathos, politics and paratha’ appeared in The Telegraph in 2013 and was chosen here for its evocation of – and ultimately its deviation from – the ‘steelbands, saris and samosas’ cliché of a superficial kind of multiculturalism, particularly prevalent during the 1997–2001 period of New Labour governance in the UK. A celebratory mode of public discourse around multiculturalism at the time would elevate a select few Black and Asian voices into the literary mainstream. This chapter interrogates the legacy of so-called ‘3S multiculturalism’ by analysing how critical reviews have shifted their tone over time and whether these shifts mirror broader societal attitudes to multiculturalism. The chapter unpicks the entangled, fascinating relationships between the Midlands, its writers, the publishing industry, the book-buying public, and the multicultural identity politics at the core of British nationhood.

This chapter considers turn-of-the-millennium fiction and film of transnational and intra-national organ sale, in which racial inequalities characterise donor pools and access to transplant. Texts from India, the UK and North America which engage inequalities around transfer access and clinical labour, informed by legacies of colonisation and slavery. Read at a figural level, these texts also symbolise ‘slow violence’, as Rob Nixon defines it, in which time itself is a force of ruination. Works discussed include Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1997), Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and four works of African-American harvest horror from the US and Canada: Charles Gardner Bowers’s short story ‘The black hand’ (1931), Dennis Etchison’s ‘The machine demands a sacrifice’ (1972), Walter Mosley’s short story ‘Whispers in the dark’ (2001) and Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). This chapter uses Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of a durative present, the protracted violence of quasi-events under neoliberal regimes, to consider how fictional texts present precarity and a durative present of horror. Each site’s transfer economies differ but each text engages pre- and post-surgical durée, and each resists the exoticisation of dysfunctional transfer as distant from American or European contexts.

The Multicultural Midlands works with the theoretical models of postcolonial critics, while also challenging their relevance in everyday Midlands-specific literary contexts and offering new critical insights. In this vein, the book articulates the Midlands nuances of what James Procter calls ‘the postcolonial everyday’, an aesthetic mode found in literature, which not only privileges everyday people and situations but also demonstrates how absolutely compatible these quotidian frames of reference are with writing of Black British and Asian origin. The approach to textual selection and analysis resists the lure of what Huggan calls ‘The Postcolonial Exotic’. Huggan flags up this reductive yet widespread literary-economic practice whereby diversity ‘is manipulated for the purpose of channeling difference into areas where it can be attractively packaged and, at the same time, safely contained.’ This is what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls ‘3S’ multiculturalism: ‘steelbands, saris and samosas’. Exoticism, then, can be profitably disseminated to audiences who want a taste of diversity, while stopping short of absolute immersion. Midlands writing has no lack of diversity but – in keeping with the region’s underprivileged position both in relation to the national sense of geographical hierarchy and the economic realities of literary cultures outside of London – frequently deploys representational modes relating to the ordinary, the domestic and the everyday. These literary aesthetics are not the expression of a downtrodden community but rather the proud manifestation on paper of what it means to be a Midlander.

Tom Waits’s album Bone Machine (1992) sounds like an apocalyptic vision, the clattering of percussion like a dance of skeletons, Waits's gravelly voice a necromancer conjuring America’s ghosts of both past and future. The album is itself a bone machine, a thing stitched together with all the scars showing. Its monstrosity articulates the spectres that surround an imminent apocalypse. Gothic media images are conjured up to show how much haunting, spectres and ghosts have always been part of the American national imagination. Drawing on David Wills’s concept of dorsality, in which the human is constituted in and through the technological, this chapter argues that Waits’s dorsal music employs unexpected sounds, disruptive musical technologies and vocal rasp in order to surprise and sometimes disconcert the listener. This disruptive and disrupted listening experience enables Waits to realise in auditory form a tradition of American Gothic that identifies with the outsider.

The Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival’s frequent use of non-traditional sites for performance stages a tension between text and site, in which the place of performance may alter the meaning of the text but without any proscribed (by the Beckett Estate) textual alteration. While not alone in seeing the spatial potential of Beckett’s work, Sean Doran’s programming of the festival manages a novel approach to presenting the short works within a festival context. He creates a journey to and from the performance, leading to a festival that is both generically and spatially unruly and which maps Beckett’s artworks onto the local landscapes. An interaction of some sort with the landscape becomes a vital aspect of audiences’ experiences of these productions. This body of spatially and generically unruly productions provides a new way of working within textual boundaries, creating living, breathing versions of the works. In a sense, the festival refuses the logic of boundaries, whether of institutional, geographic, generic or textual sorts. Contextualising this festival within the broader field of biographical and international arts festivals, this essay will trace how site offers a new mode of adaptation within the Beckett canon, reframing the tensions in the work between text and performance and showing how Beckett’s work can be seen, in certain contexts, as more porously open to change than is generally thought to be the case. This chapter will show how site and the festival form of production intertwine in this process of adaptation.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Dracula visits the cinematograph upon arrival in London, made plausible by setting the scene in the year of the novel’s publication, 1897. The film forcefully reminds us that Dracula and cinema are contemporaneous; fin-de-siècle Gothic and cinema emerge concurrently because they are produced out of the same cultural, social and historical forces. Supernatural claims were made on behalf of cinematic technology: ‘death will no longer be final’, concluded one account of the Lumière Cinématographe premiere. Less enamoured reporters described the new medium in strange and spectral, even deathly, terms; most famously perhaps, Maxim Gorky: ‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows…’. But if there was something ‘Gothic’ about emergent cinema, there was something ‘cinematic’ about the resurgent Gothic. This chapter identifies and analyses proto-filmic elements in works by Stevenson, Wilde, Wells and Stoker.

Beckett notoriously opposed stage performances of All That Fall because it was intended to ‘come out of the dark’. By assessing two productions of the radio play by Mouth on Fire from 2019, performed to a wholly blindfolded audience at Tullow parish church in Beckett’s native Foxrock and Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of Irish president Michael D. Higgins, this chapter argues that the effect of transposition is not merely confined to visually distracting an audience from the dialogue and soundscape. Rather, the effect of where it was performed, and the necessary setting of its transposition, demanded that the play inevitably formed part of a broader event beyond its original intent. As a consequence, the two performances, which embraced the idea of using the play as the centrepiece of a commemorative event, amplified both the subject matter of the play (a meditation on Beckett’s childhood community) and a revisiting of the play’s production history (Beckett’s unilateral withdrawal of permission to perform his work in Ireland in the 1950s). The dialogue between audience and performance ultimately enabled local acknowledgement of Beckett as an Irish writer and a member of the community which he described in the play, and also allowed for a reappraisal of his central concerns about what might be lost in transferral from radio to stage in comparison to what might be gained. In addition, these productions are situated against the background of two earlier stagings by Out of Joint and Jermyn Street.

Chapter 7 explores how African Caribbean writers have written the urban landscape in original, political and often surreal ways. One creative response is to see within the surroundings an ‘elsewhere’ place of ancestral belonging: super-imposing layered images in a creative representation. This chapter explores poetry, art and music to better understand a Pan-African perspective on the Midlands articulated by Black creatives, from the 1970s to the twenty-first century. Alternative spatial conceptions of the inner city are unlocked through readings that interrogate how racism and colonialism have shaped Handsworth, and how the place has, in turn, birthed waves of globally recognised art.

The epilogue points the way forward to the development of class relations in the nineteenth century and the increasing importance of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People (1812), made the case that the working classes of Ireland and Britain had a common cause in their need to overthrow tyranny in order to advance the cause of justice and equality. Shelley was an unusual pioneer in making these connections and understanding that historical processes united people beyond their immediate context. The political arguments advocated in his later writings are informed by his understanding of the interconnected nature of Britain and Ireland, and a wider sense of global injustice that would become apparent to more writers in the nineteenth century.

The Beckett on Film project (2000) adapted all nineteen of Beckett’s theatre works, creating screen versions that were shown at film festivals, as television broadcasts, sold as a DVD box set and distributed via online video streaming. This chapter argues that these evolutions of the project are more significant than simply repackaging the content produced in one medium for distribution in another. Rather, they work with and reflect on the borders between mediums, and the ways that creative works fit into new medial environments. Beckett on Film can be seen not as a fixed text (or collection of texts), but as a mobile and mutable work that changes in relation to medium and audience, with different spatial and temporal specificities across the history of these adaptation processes. The chapter traces the British and Irish stories of how the Blue Angel production company, the Irish broadcaster RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) and the British Channel 4 television channel framed Beckett on Film in its various manifestations. The chapter addresses the project’s genesis, production, scheduling for cinema and its television screenings to specialist, general and then educational audiences. It also considers how the project’s adaptation into the ‘new’ media of DVD and online video framed the series as a cultural asset and a prestige collectable, aligning it with discourses of taste and connoisseurship. The chapter makes the case for Beckett on Film’s resilience and its fit with an emergent culture of media convergence in which medial boundaries are being renegotiated.

This chapter looks firstly at an East-African Asian chicken shop to understand how history, heritage and humour intertwine in everyday multicultural Leicester. It then turns to the poetry of Leicester writer Carol Leeming, examining the ways in which her work complicates official representations of multiculturalism broadcast to the world. The stereotyped tropes of ‘steelbands, saris and samosas’ are challenged, as close readings of Leicester texts shed light on theoretical alternatives to civic multiculturalism.

Metaphors for transfer tissue help to normalise transfer process, and procurement protocols are influenced by a society’s values. This chapter examines dystopian fictions of state-sanctioned coercive harvest in which discursive work performs its own violence alongside the scalpels. While the fictions are fantastical, covert hierarchies of life value are also in play today, as are metaphors for transfer tissue (waste, gift, natural resources and vegetation). I contrast works from the early days of transplantation around the time of the emergence of neurological criteria for death – Cordwainer Smith’s novella ‘A planet called Shayol’ (1961), Larry Niven’s A Gift from Earth (1968) and Dennis Etchison’s ‘Calling all monsters’ (1973) – with twenty-first-century novels, Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2007), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Ninni Holmqvist’s novel Enhet (The Unit) (2006). All six texts imagine people reduced to ‘ungrievable lives’ (Judith Butler), no longer recognised as quite human; these characters are consigned to social death and dismemberment for organs. Yet the twenty-first century works also show characters’ internalising these metaphors in ways that reinforce social hierarchies. Hints of resistance emerge in what might be called ‘queer’ time (Elizabeth Freeman), in which a person marked as socially non-normative dreams of interpersonal connection.

Tania Bruguera’s work combines performance with installation art, addressing the imbalance between politics and power on a one-to-one human scale. For Bruguera, a Cuban artist and activist, Endgame is a tool for examining and discussing mind-structures around and about control. This chapter focuses on her recent approach to Endgame, which explores violence, domination, servitude, authority, transgression and the possibility of challenging power. Respecting Beckett’s text completely, Bruguera challenges public and spectator through a setting reminiscent of Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’. Through detailed description and in-depth analysis of Bruguera’s stage proposal, this chapter provides elements to approach the point of view of an artist ready to bring Beckett to the contemporary art arena as well as to the contemporary post-democratic chorus.