Zuhri James
Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction
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‘I don’t think character exists anymore’, Rachel Cusk declared in a 2018 interview. This was not the first time Cusk appeared to be announcing the atrophy of the traditional novel. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Cusk stated she was ‘certain autobiography’ was ‘increasingly the only form in all the arts’. Inversely, fiction and its conventional preoccupation with ‘making up John and Jane’, Cusk argued, was only becoming more ‘ridiculous’, ‘fake and embarrassing’. It is precisely this disregard for literary orthodoxy that runs through Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of autofictional novels – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018). The books are narrated by a divorced writer named Faye who, at first, appears to do very little and divulges even less, and it is from this withdrawn tenor that the trilogy derives its distinctive feel. Throughout the series, Faye documents her conversations with people she encounters in her daily life. The term ‘conversation’, however, may be somewhat misleading here; these are often heavily one-sided encounters dominated by the long, drawn-out monologues of those Faye meets. She therefore ‘receives’, as Heidi Julavits has written, in ways akin to ‘a recording device or a processing machine’. As Faye listens to each of her interlocutors in turn, there is no conventional narrative arc that proceeds from beginning to middle and end. With Faye’s personal details remaining largely concealed, there is also no attempt to follow the linear paths of traditional character development. Instead, each novel fluidly drifts through a mélange of fragmentary encounters that Faye finds herself intimately and often haphazardly enmeshed within. And yet, these spontaneous encounters always extend beyond the immediacies of the moment. As Faye locates within other people’s stories, glimpses into larger questions of life, society, morality and art, passages constantly flicker between the micro and the macro, the split second and the longue durée.
At first, there did appear to be a progressive undercurrent running through Cusk’s trilogy that seemed to hint towards the larger, liberatory promises of autofiction. Indeed, it felt we were implicitly being prompted to look outwards; to open ourselves up to the subjectivities of others at a time when the masses of society were (and still are) increasingly turning inwards, reverting to a hostile mode of solipsism, not least as demonstrated by Brexit or, even more recently, the host of far-right racist riots across England. It was precisely this move towards a sealing off of the self that Faye seemed to symbolically repudiate, as she listened closely to the stories and worldviews of the strangers she encountered. What the ‘I’ at the heart of autofiction appeared to resemble, then, was not so much an egotistical narcissist but a suggestive cipher for how we might lead our own lives at a time when society was, and still is, being frayed across multiple fronts by all kinds of aggressive nationalisms, racisms and patriarchal structures. This was a new approach to literature, it seemed, that was offering hope in an age of uncertainty.
The phantoms of duplicity continually lurked beneath the surface of the texts.
The line, however, was always drawn thin. Faye’s attentive listening remained, at times, politically ambiguous. Her musings on the people she encountered were widely praised by critics for their demonstration of a certain ‘intellectual sophistication’. Cusk, relatedly, was celebrated as ‘the most unsettling and philosophically astute British novelist at work today’. The phantoms of duplicity, however, continually lurked beneath the surface of the texts. Throughout the trilogy, it was often unclear, for instance, whether Faye’s willingness to listen to people’s stories and conundrums evidenced an ongoing attempt to empathetically relate to others, or whether it was exacerbating a particular form of conceit. Shrewd readers of the trilogy will have noticed, for example, how Faye is constantly correcting people’s malapropisms, as demonstrated in Transit, where we find Faye correcting an Albanian builder, Tony, who is renovating her house (‘“I love England,” he said. “I love most the English cakes.” He grinned. “Especially the hijack.” You mean flapjack, I said”’). This corrective impulse was also, at times, accompanied by a host of satirical descriptions that appeared to be embedded within a more sinister belief system. The considerable number of references to whether strangers were fat or thin, for instance, seemed to reveal Faye’s internalisation of unnecessarily dualistic expectations that society places on bodies today. And then there were all of Faye’s besmirching comments on people’s large noses and dirty teeth. The issue, here, was not only that Faye’s observations often swerved into the realm of the derogatory. Rather, it was a swerve into the derogatory that was, at once, steeped in vanity. The reaffirmation of Faye’s self came at a cost. Others had to be degraded so that she could be elevated. Nowhere was this more sharply drawn into view than in Transit, the second novel in Cusk’s trilogy, which centres around Faye moving into a new house in London. At one point in the book, Faye meets an elderly woman named Paula who lives with her husband in the council flat below. Through a series of descriptive passages, Paula is depicted as a paradigmatic example of the anachronistic neighbour. She thumps her ceiling with a broom handle when Faye makes too much noise above, and her flat exudes ‘a foul, meaty smell’, which incessantly rises up through Faye’s floorboards. Eventually, Faye knocks on Paula’s door to inform her of the noise that will accompany the upcoming renovation of the home above:
We were in their sitting room; we’d passed down an oppressive corridor with a sagging, yellowed ceiling from which I’d caught a glimpse through the door to a bedroom where a mattress lay on the floor beneath a heap of filthy sheets and blankets and empty bottles. The sitting room was a cluttered, cave-like place; Paula sat on a brown velour sofa. She was a powerfully built, obese woman with coarse grey hair cut in a bob around her face. Her large, slack body had an unmistakable core of violence… I watched her big body writhe slightly, her head twisting from side to side, as though something inside her was rising and unfolding, wanting to be born.
In an essay published last year, the critic Emma Copley Eisenberg argued: ‘Fatphobia is the literary world’s final frontier’. If this is the case, it could be said that Cusk’s autofiction is at the spearhead of this frontier. After all, this is Faye, a middle-class writer, describing her new downstairs neighbour as an almost Falstaffian figure whose ‘obese’ body elicits an ‘unmistakable core of violence’. Yet when did corpulence become a marker of intrinsic violence? When did it become acceptable to compare lower class council tenants to ‘a force, a power of elemental negativity’? As we move through Cusk’s three novels, it becomes clearer this kind of disgust that Faye holds for others is not an exception, but rather one of the trilogy’s defining tenets. This recurrence is perturbing because as the stereotypical descriptions of English poverty accumulate, Faye’s contempt for those she considers beneath her increasingly seems to reflect a larger, ingrained worldview. In this context, it is difficult to ignore certain parallels between Faye and Cusk. Just like Cusk, Faye is a female writer with two children who has gone through a divorce. Both attend literary workshops, giving talks along the way. Faye’s disdain for particular bodies also mirrors a piece written by Cusk in 2012, where she argued anorexic women primarily look to stage statements with their bodies and thus garner attention from others. ‘Trust me, notice me, feed me’, Cusk wrote in the article, where she also described an anorexic woman as a ‘68lb tyrant’.
Clearly, then, there is a zone of imbrication between Faye’s ideological prejudices and the writer from which this protagonist has emerged. But why identify such parallels? Is there not a risk that in searching for the author within the text, we risk denying the writer the freedom not to be conflated with their protagonists? Why don’t we instead follow the lead of Roland Barthes by entirely disregarding the position and possible intentions of the author, in favour of a more open field of interpretation? These are valid lines of rebuttal yet Cusk, herself, seems to fundamentally disagree with them.
In a recent talk held in Islington that marked the release of her new book, Parade (2024), Cusk was asked a question that was intriguing both in terms of its composition and the answer that it elicited. ‘Art in its truest shape and form must be completely cleared of all ethical, philosophical, humanitarian and social messages’, the audience member began, drawing from something Vladimir Nabokov once said. ‘Do you think your work is in line with Nabokov’s vision of pure art’, the audience member continued, ‘or are you trying to convey some message?’ Immediately, Cusk responded: ‘very proudly not in line with our friend Nabokov… I completely don’t agree with that. Maybe that was a male prerogative at a certain period that now looks more and more suspect and more and more cosseted’. She continued: ‘once we move out of [that] terrain, people need to explain themselves, they need to explain who they are… where they’ve come from and what’s happened to them’. Clearly, then, Cusk is inviting a closer interrogation of the contiguous zone between herself and protagonists like Faye whom she has created, particularly as this is mediated by her own beliefs and historical circumstances. The issue, however, is that if we respond to Cusk’s call by examining whether her new novel, Parade, passes the parameters of her own litmus test, the situation looks rather dismal.
Homelessness is trivialised as a mirror through which Cusk can reflect on changes within her own life.
The title of Cusk’s Parade refers to a parade of artists all of whom are signified by the initial ‘G’. One of these is a male painter who begins to paint upside down because ‘at a certain point in his career… he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history’. Another is a female sculptor whose hallmarks resemble ‘the giant forms of black spiders, balanced on stiletto-like feet’. Throughout the book, the narrator’s voice oscillates between third person episodes, exploring the lives of these Gs, and first-person accounts that document Cusk’s experiences of living in France. It is precisely within one of these first-person narratives where we find the novel’s first unsavoury moment. In the passage, Cusk describes a rather strange sequence of events that saw her move out of her apartment after the previous resident asked for it back. What follows is a kind of lament for the peripatetic way of life that ensued: ‘for several weeks we stayed in one place after another, never unpacking our suitcases… the lady’s apartment had been like a boat, and now we were cast into the sea… we moved to another temporary apartment and then another’. As Cusk continues to recount this physical uprooting, she proceeds to compare her situation with the experiences of homeless people:
In the streets people were sleeping huddled in doorways or under bridges and walkways, or sometimes in tents they had pitched on the pavements. Everyone walked past them, these reproaches to subjectivity, with apparent indifference. We ourselves, outsiders, in a limbo of our own making, perhaps felt the reproach differently. At home people also slept in doorways: here it took us longer to forget them.
In 2013, the novelist Jane Smiley argued Cusk’s memoir, Aftermath (2013), read ‘like a tantrum – an erudite and eloquent tantrum, but a tantrum nonetheless’. Eleven years on, nothing, it seems, has changed. To try and locate resonances between her new itinerant arrangements and the transitory lives of homeless people reveals a complete disconnect with reality. As Cusk writes, ‘we had left, our own home… of our own volition’ after being asked by the previous resident to do so. She continues, at one point bemoaning the move to ‘a place with a broken boiler, where we could not remove our coats’. Homeless people, of course, are not afforded the luxury of being able to willingly move from apartment to apartment. This is a societal underclass who sleep on cold streets with scant clothing and often no heating arrangements. They are widely vilified across contemporary society. And, most importantly, they often find themselves in situations of precarity by no fault of their own. Cusk, in contrast, is describing an unearthing that she herself has put in motion. The resonances she attempts to trace, then, between her own experiences and homeless people who sleep ‘huddled in doorways… under bridges and walkways’ are distasteful and crass. Homelessness is merely being trivialised as a kind of mirror through which Cusk can reflect on changes within her own life. In this light, Cusk appears to emblematise the phenomenon of the hysterical critic. Coined by the feminist literary enfant terrible Lauren Oyler, hysterical critics are self-centred ‘not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings’. As Oyler notes, these self-absorbed tendencies come with certain qualifications (or lack thereof): by habitually making everything about themselves, hysterical critics are ‘pretty bad at interpreting other stuff’. This seems particularly apposite in the context of the passage above. Not only does Cusk see herself as the centre of orbit around which all else revolves, she does so in ways that pivot upon half-baked, asinine invocations of homelessness.
Unfortunately for readers, the clumsy interpretations proffered in Parade don’t stop at the comparisons Cusk draws between her own life and the experiences of homeless people. Other planes of marginality are also dubiously invoked. In her discussion of another G, a Black artist who she confirmed in Islington to be Norman Lewis, Cusk explores the relationship between blackness, aesthetics and the politics of representation. Cusk begins by describing her experience of first seeing Lewis’s 1950 painting Cathedral, which struck her ‘as small, for the reason perhaps that its subject was big’. She continues, contemplating how in marked contrast to his contemporaries, Lewis was largely excluded from exhibitions, museums and art galleries. ‘His work was appreciated,’ Cusk writes, ‘but he was accorded no significance.’ The reason for this, Cusk posits, was because of Lewis’s move away from a more easily decipherable style of social realism, which formed the locus of his early career, towards abstract expressionism. At a time when Lewis was expected to explicitly address questions of blackness and social justice, this transition to abstract art was, according to Cusk, a self-sabotaging act because ‘the marginalised artist, like any marginalised person, is obliged to reckon with reality first’. Abstraction, in this context, could only be seen as a deviation from his ‘duty to represent, to stay in representation’.
On the face of it, Cusk’s contention here that Lewis’s career stagnated after he pivoted towards abstract expressionism may seem innocuous. Yet it is both misguiding and ill-informed. Reading the passage, one gets the impression that Lewis’s move towards abstract art during the mid 1940s was wholly shunned because, as Cusk put it, he ‘set reality aside’. But this is simply not true. Consider, for instance, Lewis’s 1962 painting Evening Rendezvous, which was completed a decade and a half after he began to move into the realm of abstract expressionism. At first glance, the painting appears to consist of aleatory brushstrokes of white, red and blue spread across a dark canvas of greens and greys. On closer examination, however, we realise the painting is depicting a nighttime gathering of white hooded Ku Klux Klansmen who are carrying red torches and lighting bonfires. This is not some late, anodyne meeting but a chilling, white supremacist assembly. Significantly, the painting resonates with others that Lewis completed during this period like his 1960 American Totem, which depicts a hooded Ku Klux Klansman whose totem-like structure, in conjunction with the painting’s provocative title, hints towards the sinister entanglements between Americanism and anti-Black racism. Evidently, Lewis’s later abstract paintings were not entirely devoid of socio-political content.
Seen in this context, it is wrong for Cusk to argue that the waning of Lewis’s career stemmed from his ‘abandonment’ of social realist figuration because he never did abandon it entirely. As Phillip Barcio has argued, the impasse that Lewis encountered as he ventured into abstract expressionism was instead conditioned by something more structural: ‘despite the way the white, post-war, American art establishment embraced abstract art, it nonetheless mostly dismissed the work of Black artists, abstract or not’. What Barcio is beginning to get to the heart of here is precisely that which is elided in Cusk’s analysis. Namely, that art galleries, museums and other exhibitionary spaces were structurally racist institutions, which, until relatively recently, grudgingly opened their doors to Black artists. Indeed, when the Ghanian-British artist John Akomfrah recalls his own experience of approaching the Arts Council for funding in the early 1980s, when he was told ‘you can’t be avant garde because Blacks can’t be avant-garde’, he isn’t only speaking about his own experiences in England with the Arts Council towards the end of the twentieth century. He is instead diagnosing an experience that reverberates across the African diaspora, where Black artists have long had to navigate a western art world sutured by all kinds of assumptions and norms rooted in the histories of colonial modernity. Seen in this light, the dwindling of Lewis’s career cannot be reduced to a chain of events where he ‘wanted to paint abstract paintings’ but ‘wasn’t allowed to’ because of expectations that were placed upon him to solely depict the ‘black experience’, as Cusk put it in her recent Islington talk. It was instead to do with a crisis of representation baked into the very ideas of abstraction, experimentalism and the avant-garde, which have long been defined by an exclusionary racialised politics.
The most disturbing facet of Cusk’s analysis, however, is not how she glosses over the structural constraints that Lewis encountered. It is, instead, Cusk’s initial motivations for including an exploration of Lewis in Parade that should perturb us most. In her Islington talk, Cusk discussed what she saw as the ‘terrible obligation’ that Lewis was burdened with as a Black artist who was expected ‘to talk about… marginalisation’ in ways that foreclosed his ability to ‘just go off and be an abstract painter’. She continued, seemingly documenting why her ruminations on Lewis found their way into the book: ‘I think that is such an interesting area to interrogate’. This is telling. Not dissimilar to her invocation of homelessness earlier on in Parade, other people’s marginalised experiences have become something for her to contemplate and reflect on. The tensions and contradictions of navigating a racially hostile art world as a Black artist have become something she is fascinated by. The key act of indictment here lies in Cusk’s phrase, ‘I think’, which, by definition, ties the challenges that Lewis encountered back into her own thoughts and subjectivities. There are echoes here of a tendency that the literary critic Zsofia Paulikovics identified in Cusk’s Outline trilogy. A tendency that has, it seems, only intensified with the passing of time: ‘even when Cusk is writing about others, she is still writing about herself’.
Life as a minority is now something people are deeply fascinated by.
The issue here is one that relates to questions of passivity and distance. While Lewis’s experiences as a Black abstract painter provide Cusk with ‘such an interesting area to interrogate’ from afar, marginalised artists continue to struggle with various permutations of racism across the art world. Black artists, for instance, are still confronted with all kinds of barriers and ceilings differentially imposed upon them, ranging from pay inequality to a dire lack of representation across contemporary art galleries and museums. In the absence of any serious engagement or, indeed, even peripheral allusions to these ongoing issues, Cusk’s fascination with the singular example of Lewis serves only to isolate and therefore radically decontextualise the spectre of anti-blackness as it has historically structured, and continues to structure, the art world today.
Cusk’s parochial analysis is of course by no means new when considered in relation to the ways in which critics have historically written about Black art. Amiri Baraka famously wrote an essay in 1963, for instance, on white jazz critics who dominated twentieth-century music criticism. Most of these critics, Baraka wrote, ‘began as hobbyists or boyishly brash members of the American petit bourgeoisie’. What Baraka was identifying here was a highly dubious stance adopted by critics, who tended ‘to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for… a music that in its most profound manifestations’ was ‘completely antithetical to such standards’. Paul Gilroy in 1993 observed the escalation of an analogous tendency among a growing number of white music consumers, who took ‘pleasure in the transgression and dangerousness’ of Black music, ‘without discovering similar enthusiasm for either the company of real live black people or the history of their struggles against slavery, for citizenship and towards personal and social autonomy’. More recently, Zadie Smith has charted a kind of paradigm shift in these historical tendencies. ‘Who owns Black pain?’ Smith asks. By way of Jordan Peele’s film, Get Out, Smith argues we are now entering an era defined by ‘a new kind of cannibalism’. Blackness is no longer ignored nor is it rendered entirely superfluous. Instead, there is now a desire ‘to get inside the black experience’, Smith argues, ‘they want to wear it like a skin and walk around in it’. The tendencies pinpointed by Baraka and Gilroy have therefore been elevated to new, almost mythological heights. Life as a minority is now something people are deeply fascinated by. They extensively ponder and write about it. The issue with this, as Smith notes, is the escalation of a fetishistic desire to possess ‘perhaps more than anything else’, experiences of ‘pain’ across minority diasporas. It seems to me there is something cognate between the new cannibalism identified by Smith, and Cusk outlining how she has been transfixed with the plateauing of Lewis’s career as a Black abstract painter. After all, on a basic level, Cusk has included her musings on Lewis’s career in a book. A book she will have been commissioned to write and give subsequent talks on. Seen in this light, the idea that Cusk is feeding off the experience of the marginalised artist is not confined to an ideological fascination she seems to have internalised. There is an important material dimension that can be discerned too: writing in highly facile ways about the challenges experienced by a Black artist like Norman Lewis comes with certain monetary benefits.
This is ironic since Cusk, in her aforementioned Islington talk, argued there is no vacuum or detached bubble within which writers can insulate themselves or their art. They therefore ‘need to explain themselves’, Cusk argued, they need to disclose ‘their politics and the rules they’ve had to live by’. But where are Cusk’s writings in Parade coming from? What are the rules she has had to live by? On the face of it, Cusk appears to have emerged from relatively advantageous circumstances. She comes, for instance, from a wealthy Catholic family. She also attended a private school in Cambridge after which she then read English at the University of Oxford. In a recent Forbes article, it was documented that a $2.7 million house on the North Norfolk coast – belonging to Cusk and, presumably, her husband Siemon Scamell-Katz with whom she designed it – had hit the market. When Cusk is telling us, then, that writers need to be transparent about their own background, it is difficult to hear anything other than an extraordinary lack of self-awareness given that elitism, wealth and privilege lie at the core of her own identity as a writer. There is of course another elephant in the room that might be flagged here. As the feminist writer Sara Ahmed has written, ‘whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach… not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits’. Race, Ahmed argues, is therefore ‘a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do “things” with’. Transposed to a literary context, Ahmed’s contention prompts us to ask a series of questions. How is it that someone can write about marginality, homelessness and race as they simultaneously remain entirely oblivious to their own privileged circumstances as a white, wealthy, privately educated, middle-class writer? Indeed, why has this dissonance been met with such adulation? In November 2024, for instance, Cusk’s Parade won the £10,000 Goldsmith’s Prize; an award that was established in 2013 to celebrate ‘fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. One reviewer in The Guardian valorised the book as ‘a brilliant and unsettling feat’. Another went as far to say that Parade has shattered ‘the assumptions of the contemporary novel and reconstructed something breathtakingly new and radically beautiful from the rubble’. But what is ‘brilliant’ about using homeless people as a mirror to reflect on one’s own life as a wealthy, privately educated, middle-class writer? What is ‘breathtakingly new and radically beautiful’ about a book that transmutes race and racism into objects of fascination that can be ruminated on from a distance?
Avant-garde, experimental art is still a terrain largely reserved for white artists.
In a piece written on autofiction for The New Republic, the novelist Tope Folarin poses the question: why is ‘the hottest literary trend of the last decade… so blindingly white’. Folarin begins with a relatively simple yet telling exercise: ‘Quick: What names come to mind when you hear the term “autofiction”?’ Folarin is of course being playfully provocative here. He knows the associations that are likely to come to mind: Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard. ‘I’ve seen these writers grouped together so often over the years’, Folarin writes, ‘that I’ve started to think of them as partners in a kind of literary professional services firm’. The connective tissue between these writers is, of course, impossible to miss: ‘What nearly all writers of autofiction seem to have in common is that they’re white.’ Folarin’s intention here is not to deny the presence of autofictional writers from marginalised backgrounds (he explicitly acknowledges significant contributions from writers like Zinzi Clemmons, Akwaeke Emezi and Mitchell Jackson, to which we could also add someone like Yūko Tsushima). What Folarin does make clear, however, is that these writers are rarely mentioned in contemporary appraisals of autofiction. The reason for this is because, for the most part, marginalised writers are placed by critics under the rubric of autobiography instead of autofiction. This categorisation has immense implications. While autofiction is seen as a genre that is ‘at the cutting edge of literary innovation’, autobiographical fiction is seen as entirely conventional and banal. Those who are seen as helping to create a new, experimental form of literature are, therefore, overwhelmingly white. Novels from writers of colour, on the other hand, are aligned by critics with a genre that is ‘as old as time’. Folarin’s observations are important not only because he identifies the skewed demographics of autofiction, but because he situates autofiction within the larger choreographies of ‘a Western literary landscape dominated by white editors, white critics, and white readers’.
For all its claims to fluid, amorphous prose untethered to plot and traditional character development, autofiction – and herein lies the irony – remains firmly representational, if not entirely conventional. Demographically, writers remain predominantly white and in this sense the genre, instead of challenging systemic inequality, has merely reinforced it. Writers like Cusk are able to misanthropically write about things like obesity and the lower-class, while also using homelessness to reflect on their own privileged circumstances, as if any such parallels can be drawn. All of this is then lauded by critics as contributing to a genre that is seen as highly innovative and avant-garde. In this context, a book like Parade can be celebrated as ‘a daring work of experimentation that strikes out against conformity’ even as the book conforms to a well-established history of white critics being disingenuously fascinated by the struggles that Black artists experience.
If, as Baraka observed in 1963, critics are ‘influenced… deeply by the social and cultural mores of their own society’ and it is, therefore, ‘only natural that their criticism… should be a product of that society’, then all of this is extremely revealing. White, middle-class, privately educated writers are now able to write about forms of marginality that are entirely incommensurate with their own circumstances, without ever showing any solidarity with those whose lives are textured by all manners of injustice. This writing is then hailed by white, middle-class, privately educated critics whose embellishing reviews only further provide the fertile grounds for more writing on marginality from white, middle-class, privately educated writers. The result is a highly distorted and self-perpetuating cycle of normality. The dismal state of affairs that Akomfrah identified almost fifty years ago is alive and well. Avant-garde, experimental art is still a terrain largely reserved for white artists. By this point, it should come as no surprise that Cusk in Parade remains blind to the ways in which Norman Lewis’s career was impeded by the pervasiveness of structural racism across the art world. She herself operates within a genre of literature that is also systematically sealed off to artists of colour.
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Zuhri James is a doctoral candidate at King’s College, University of Cambridge. He grew up in Hackney and is interested in cities, urban nature, soundscapes and postcolonialism.
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