Exposure: a postcolonial turn in urban ethnography

A diary kept during the development of Sugar, a commission of the Liverpool Capital of Culture Festival (2006–2007), was the occasion of an autoethnography. This essay reflects on the triangulation made between the architecture of slavery, contemporary discourses of ‘youth culture’ and the dissolution of the representational frame as thematics or topics liquefied into the repressed topology of the city; a direct analogy is made between the famous but inaccessible Williamson tunnels and the creative unconscious of a post-representationalist dramaturgical practice. The ghost volumetrics of this history are cathected into a movement form, assimilable to the kinetics of hip-hop culture; a new topologically identified community was felt to emerge that performed Sugar largely in the sense of channelling its concerns back into cultural traces continuously in informal production. The relationship between peripatetic dramaturg and peripherally located creative youth mapped an urban dérive quite different from that cultivated by the Situationists, a secret tracking or collaboration that linked urban ethnography to a decolonising dramaturgy.