About

This research aims to fill a gap in the existing literature on the seminal Black Audio Film Collective, the black British filmmaking collective active between the years 1982-1998. Their activity spans the consolidation of Thatcherism and New Labourism, a period which had deep consequences – material, intellectual, and aesthetic – for how we think about race, nation, and the arts in the UK today. They sought to respond to the transformations of UK society by studying social upheavals and cultural expression through film and documentary. A critical study of their oeuvre is vital to deepening our understanding of black arts and anti-racist struggle in the UK.

While the BAFC is widely lauded, there is no book-length study of the collective. Most interpretative literature on the BAFC does not move beyond aesthetic interpretation to the broader social forces out of which it emerges. Equally, no critical works on the social history of the period take BAFC as their sustained object. This project seeks to overcome this binary by synthesizing these two levels of analysis, while concentrating in a novel way as much on the audio as on the film in their works.

I ask what a close aesthetic reading of the BAFC works can tell us about the restructuring of British Capitalism in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Correspondingly, what a historical and theoretical reading of this restructuring can tell us about these works. This requires a two-fold object of study: first, the BAFC’s rich archive of films, of which many remain unwatched; second, materialist and post-colonial readings of politics, culture, and society.

Using these analytic tools, this project will contribute to the urgent and re-emerging field of British postcolonial and cultural studies, rendering new historical and aesthetic questions possible regarding a renowned yet understudied corpus.