Resumen de Writing the Trespasser: David Oluwale and the City of Leeds
This keynote address explores the disciplined dynamics of mobility and constraint that impact upon human motility at large, with particular reference to the disruptive figure of the trespasser. It proceeds by reflecting upon the UK’s recent “hostile environment” policy and its engendering of the “Windrush Betrayal,” as a means of foregrounding the precarious condition of all migrants, permitted and prohibited. This hostile environment has a long history, reaching back decades, as evidenced in the racist hounding by the Leeds City Police of the Nigerian migrant David Oluwale that resulted in his death in 1969. By exploring recent representations of Oluwale’s uncommissioned urban mobility, I argue that Oluwale’s truculent trespassing, always in defiance of authority’s racist prohibitions, has been prized by writers keen to contest both Leeds’s and the UK’s ongoing racism, and mobilised to recognise the undimmed agency of brigandly spatial motion
