Roy Fisher’s City and the Affective Landscapes of Modernization

This article considers Roy Fisher’s 1961 prose-poem City in the context of slum clearance and urban modernization in the postwar period. Modernization projects, like those in Fisher’s native Birmingham, sought to employ figures of destruction and ruin for the sake of constructing a literal and figurative new Britain after World War II. In doing so, it treated the process of clearing “slum” housing as necessary for the sake of progress. This article argues that City attempts to register the affective landscapes of the postwar city while not directing those affects to any particular political or representational project. Instead, Fisher is concerned with a nonrecuperative form of mourning for the environments and communities lost amid destruction and violence. The poem presents regional specificity of Britain’s postwar landscapes through a late-modernist, fragmentary form for the purpose of gathering together affects of loss, disappearance, and destruction without attempting to resolve their fundamental discontinuity.