We are thrilled to be joined by Dr Clive Nwonka for the group’s next meeting which will be on Wednesday 31st March at 5pm via Zoom. Dr Nwonka will be delivering a talk entitled: ‘The Social Aesthetics of Urban Film.’

Please find the abstract below. For details on how to join the meeting, and any further questions, please get in touch here: F.A.Kamm@kent.ac.uk; S.Wang@kent.ac.uk

All welcome!

British urban cinema can broadly be defined as the body of films emerging in the early 2000’s with a shared set of aesthetic and narrational co-ordinates that seek to represent the experiences and subcultural practices of Black working-class youths. However, in the context of the continued collapsing of distinct black cinematic practices to within the positive/negative representational nexus or its approximation of extradiegetic realities, the habitual association between cinematic blackness and cinematic realism has curtailed any sustained analysis of the Black British urban film as a distinct aesthetic modality. Situating what I describe as the ‘popular’ British urban film within a number of thematics and theoretical frameworks, this talk explores the filmic lexicalization of Black youth identities within the urban film as a specific aesthetic form within which we can locate the interaction of a number of cultural, social and formal dimensions. In my updating of the term social aesthetic to address the ways in which the popular urban film is composed of a number of interacting and opposing discourses, this talk asks for a disavowal of the traditional modes of Black ‘realist’ film analysis and considers the aesthetic heterogeneities and intertextualities that comprise of Black urban film.

 

Dr Clive James Nwonka is a Lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York and a Visiting Fellow in Race, Culture and Inequality at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His academic research covers Black British and American film, literature, and diversity policy in the UK film industry. He is Co-Editor of the book Black Film British Cinema II (March 2021, MIT/Goldsmiths Press) and the author of the forthcoming book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (Bloomsbury).