On Air: Tubercular Modernism, Miasma, and Elemental Media

In November 1952, Britain’s National Coal Board announced that low grade ‘slack’ was being taken off ration to help ‘keep the home fires burning’. As millions of households stoked their hearths with the cheap and dusty coke, the skies over London became clotted with toxic soot. Along the Thames Valley, a temperature inversion trapped the still, chilly air at ground level, fuelling one of the deadliest environmental disasters of the twentieth century. Visibility was reduced to a few yards, with complete blackouts declared in parts of the city. Workers were sent home, while transport systems and media networks were disrupted for days on end. An estimated 12,000 Londoners died in the so-called Great Smog which choked the city during the December of that year.

The atmospheric effects of the Great Smog were felt both locally and globally. On the BBC’s Calling the West Indies radio programme, wireless announcements were hastily inserted to explain the whereabouts of missing West Indian speakers stranded on route to the studio. Sam Selvon, a young Trinidadian writer, and a regular voice on the daily broadcasts from London to Caribbean, was among countless Londoners who developed acute respiratory conditions like pulmonary tuberculosis. Admitted to a consumptive sanitorium in rural Berkshire, Selvon remained in hospital for over a year. As the Times Literary Supplement, reported ‘At least one?West Indian writer of talent has contracted tuberculosis in London, largely as a result of the appalling living conditions to which he and his family were subjected by poverty.’

Such accounts recall a much longer tradition of associations between literature and tuberculosis, from John Keats to George Orwell. Tuberculosis was not just a medical, but a cultural condition, intimately associated as Frances Wilson observes, with artists and the ‘socially invisible … the poor, the homeless, the malnourished; those whose immune systems have been weakened by overcrowding, exhaustion, drug use. It flourishes among migrant communities living in poverty, in prisons, and in hostels and halfway houses.’ While Selvon is rarely if ever mentioned in the same breath as Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984 had died of the disease just two years earlier. Both writers worked on the Empire and Colonial Services of the mid-century BBC. Each implicitly understood London’s murky air as matters of both meteorology, and the media.

If, as Mary Douglas suggests, pollution is matter out of place, then fog also shadows the imagination of West Indian settlement in Britain, from Claude McKay’s early poem, ‘London’ (1922), which opens ‘The fog prevails above all in my mind … Oh blessed was the fog that veiled me blind!’, to the arrival of the Windrush generation (1948). Extending archival findings in Scripting Empire (2024), this paper considers fog as both a recurring climactic feature of the early to mid-twentieth century, and as a key aesthetic device of late modernism. Condensed in London’s signature pea soupers are potent expressions of decadence, the miasma of the modern mass media, and the stubborn imperial residues of the late colonial margins. Fog is a substance, or medium, that when looked at rather than through, offers suggestive responses to the core questions of this conference around marginal modernism.

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The Orlando Series:

Transgender Art, Colonial Reckoning

This talk offers a genealogy for transgender embodiment in the wake of the British empire, with a particular focus on the lives and afterlives of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending fantasia, Orlando. Drawing on present-day responses to Orlando, including the work of Chitra Ganesh, Mickalene Thomas, and Paul Preciado, the talk is part of a larger book project on the queer/trans colonial archive. Unsettling what has been a longstand-ing emphasis on the criminalization of sodomy, this consideration highlights feminized migrant labor, including sex work and care work, as central to the construction of sexual normativity across empire.