A stream-of-consciousness novel capturing the 1990s jungle music scene over one weekend marks a defining moment in British multiculturalism
Ralph Ellison, in his 1952 classic Invisible Man, may have best captured a sense of blackness not as a racial absolute but as a process in culture – the darkness of lives rendered obscure by what his eponymous narrator dubs “Monopolated Light & Power”. It’s a dynamic reflected deeply in the history of UK publishing, where black voices, from Olaudah Equiano to Sam Selvon, have been so devalued that we are forever reaching back into the archives to re-establish the crucial texts of a black British canon.
It’s within this context that we should locate Repeater’s republication of Junglist by Two Fingas (Andrew Green) and James T Kirk (Eddie Otchere). Back in print after more than 20 years, the novel, written as a stream-of-consciousness reflection of a single weekend, is the contemporary account of two young black men coming of age in and around the rave scene of south London in 1994, where temperatures were soaring and jungle was staging a cultural takeover among working-class kids of many racial backgrounds, powered by an engine of drum and bass that, as the authors write, “overrides the heartbeat, that interrupts its normal pattern, its normal rhythm and makes it move”.