Racialised Violence: Riots, Space and Temporality

This short intervention offers a historical geography‐informed approach to shape understandings of the events and racialised violence of summer 2024 in the United Kingdom. We draw upon Black British Cultural Studies to foreground the importance of temporality and spatial relations for understanding racialised violence. In doing so, we identify continuities across 100 years of racialised violence in Britain whilst also noting important differences. We revisit riotous events from 1919, 1981 and 2001 to illustrate the persistence of exclusionary racism within Britain, whilst also pointing towards the endurance of anti‐racist resistance and alternative world views. Our argument points towards the immediacy of violence, in both mundane and spectacular forms, as well as the longer lasting realm of the everyday where racialised violence is (re)produced.