Race and Resistance Programme event.
Aftermath is a non-fiction lament against the racist harms of the school to prison pipeline, and corresponding white saviour fantasy of education-as-redemption in the UK. The book interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Following the terror attack at Fishmonger’s Hall in November 2019, Taneja contends with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, and draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is an attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition. It won the Gordon Burn Prize 2022.