Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about being dirty and dirtied. This chapter shows how the representations of things like mess and dirt and associated feelings like nausea, disgust, and squeamishness are bound up in revealing ways with Orwell’s depictions of the differences between totalitarian rulers and the subjects they rule. Moving in sequence through considerations of how Orwell gives filth, nausea, and disgust interesting things to do in the novel, the chapter traces a pattern of symbolic relations which culminates in the differences between the apparent cleanliness of Oceania’s political systems and the nigh-on inescapable muck of its citizens, and of the spaces they inhabit. The puritanism of Ingsoc accepts the reality of dirt, seeks to annihilate the sex instinct, and is temperamentally opposed to the aesthetic. In tracing that puritanism, Orwell made a narrative virtue of squalor. Coursing through Nineteen Eighty-Four, in other words, is a pattern of relations to do with the political work of filth and the ideological consequences of its avoidance (or apparent avoidance). This actualizing of squalor enabled Orwell to create a perennially applicable literary dystopia. It also helped him think through the complexities and inconsistencies of a politics built on the logics of filth.

This chapter engages a range of texts that, for over thirty years, have shaped understandings of black and Asian British popular fictions through numerous forms and genres. In reading, among others, crime and detective fictions, female erotica, and The X-Press’s inner-city novels, and also music and popular film, the chapter suggests two theoretical trajectories: On the one hand, it explores the liminal space of the frontline as a framework for charting the politics of popular texts. On the other, it shows how these texts often negotiate their own positionalities through a self-reflexive ‘nobrow’ aesthetics. As it moves from the late 1980s to the 1990s, the first section revisits texts by, among others, Mike Phillips, Victor Headley, Sheri Campbell, Alex Wheatle, and Courttia Newland, whose work in part surfaced as a counter-movement to a highbrow literary aesthetics. Reaching into the twenty-first century, the second part addresses more recent popular textualities, like Wiley’s or Stormzy’s grime music, contemporary estate novels by Guy Gunaratne, Olumide Popoola, and Nikesh Shukla, as well as the films of Noel Clarke and Menhaj Huda.