The black neoliberal aesthetic

Introduction

Despite the continued presence of racism, black British identities have found the UK’s creative industries particularly opportune as a site of cultural representation, which at varying moments have performed as both the vanguard of post-multicultural racial inclusion, and an enabler of the circulation of hegemonic narratives of blackness, often under the equally contested logic of cultural diversity as a policy rationale. The emergence of neoliberalism’s iteration of cultural representation, most recognisable in its application in British film and TV, has often relied on depicting matters of black social concern as the institutional basis for the presence of black Britishness on screen. However, neoliberal hegemony has also changed the conditions of black British filmic representation, presenting a much more sophisticated challenge to how one conceptualises black British film; it may purport to operate as a liberal disavowal of racism and racial exclusion, but may actually constitute neoliberal racialisation itself. What Stuart Hall (1988) defined as the ‘Relations of Representation’,

‘firstly, the question of access to the rights to representation by black artists and black cultural workers themselves. Secondly, the contestation of the marginality, the stereotypical quality and the fetishized nature of images of blacks, by the counter position of a “positive” black imagery’ (p. 27)

are both conducive to this article’s interwoven concerns. What materialises when the tenets of the regimes of representation Hall identifies; access, stereotypical quality and the positive/negative black imagery, are no longer diametrically opposed to, but have entered into an inter-reliance with the very institutions that once represented black film’s most challenging obstacle, particularly as the objective basis for the palliative measures for black Britishness’ representation? Through an analysis of the 2016 BBC Two black film drama NW, this article will pursue two distinct but not mutually exclusive lines of argument. First, in engaging with Stuart Hall’s model of ideological critique for black British film, an analysis of how neoliberalism has now given ‘black’ access through narrow depictions and now renders them positive under the command of post-racial cultural diversity supports the idea of a pro-neoliberal reordering of the relationship between the screen industries and black film. Second, my reading of NW indicates the resurrection of blackness as an essential component of the hegemonic pursuit of both post-racial black representation and images of black ‘excess’ at specific socio-cultural moments, heralding a co-dependent engagement between neoliberalism and black British film and TV drama in its reliance and fictionalising of media-influenced narratives of black casualty. What are the socio-political and cultural functions of excessive conventional blackness in black British film, and how does such black neoliberal aesthetics sustain black cultural value in the screen industries?

In recognition of a broader trend in cultural studies that Alexander (2009) identifies, that often reductively utilises Hall’s theoretical contributions as more ‘a store cupboard than a toolbox’ (459) I am particularly cognisant that a degree of tentativeness is required in one’s contemporary application of Hall. This is of particular salience given my identification of new ideological phenomena in black film emerging from a different political, social and cultural situations equally necessitating a different theoretical situation. Here, what is required is a critical engagement with Hall’s sociological/cultural reading of black British film and media representation that is renovative rather than duplicative. For example, whereas Hall et al. (1978) were invested in the emergence of ‘black criminality’ with particular regard to the moral panic of street ‘mugging’, my reappropriation of this model rests with the phenomenon of ‘black convention’ (which often positions criminality and casualty as a central tenet) with regard to black film and TV dramas. At the same time, the utility located in such analyses is the central role of both the State and mainstream media in its construction, amplification and, in my analysis, its aestheticisation. However, while Hall et al. endeavoured to situate an empirical analysis within a theoretical approach influenced predominantly by Althusser, Marx, Barthes and Gramsci, my intention to present neoliberalism’s centrality in the UK’s screen industries (as a policy basis and a narrational form) as the contradictory axis of black British identities in film constitutes an attempt at hegemonic critique by other methods, and a lacuna can be identified in Hall’s unwillingness to place the ideological mechanisms of the screen sector’s institutions at the centre of his analyses. Saha (2018) is all too aware of such analytical limitations, and his own investigation of race and racism in the media sought to update the context of Hall’s analysis to refer to the manoeuvres of public service broadcasters in ‘making’ race. As he suggests, ‘for someone who underlines the centrality of culture in political, economic and social processes, Hall in fact shows little interest in the dynamic of industrial cultural production itself’ (30). Saha’s central proposition, that an analysis of racialised images cannot neglect a consideration of the industrial production cultures that institute the images aligns with a further imperative, which is this article’s own attempt to intervene within its field of analysis, and my engagement with Hall is not to imply that cultural studies offers the acme of the study of black film. Indeed, much of the contemporary hybridising of cultural studies and black film studies have produced analyses that are very much the reductive index of a descriptive Hall(ian) theoretical framework becoming a prescriptive one. Richard Dyer (1998), in a particular refrain, criticised such analyses for not acknowledging their own ideology, suggesting that ‘at worst, this can be a reductive seeking out of politically incorrect narrative structures and stereotypical characters or an impossibly elusive word-playing, obfuscatory ‘deconstruction’ (p. 8). One can find both value and criticism in Dyer’s position. In the work of Ross (1996) and Bourne (2005), one finds cultural studies influenced analyses that have indeed approached the study of black British film through the lens of classification rather than judgement. However, a holistic textual reading is an inadequate language to expose the heavily layered ideological functions of black film as, in all the simplicity of the film-as-film analysis, it is taking on the identically ideological function of naturalising textual representations of blackness that often exist in a political sphere. In other words, the very composite nature of black film insists on a methodology prepared not just to venture, but ground its analysis beyond text. At this level of context, I endeavour to describe how the institutional production of NW is in itself ideological, insofar as it performs the very excision of race that neoliberalism requires, while a textual analysis provides an exemplar for understanding how a black neoliberal aesthetic is visually represented in a racialised filmic universe within the overt politics of diversity. Reading the industrial context and its textual outcomes as symbiotic, a critical analysis of NW proceeds beyond both debates of racial stereotype (Neale, 1979) and the burden of representation (Mercer, 1994) to address the discursive reconceptualisation of the valuation and conditions of racial subjectivity that black neoliberal aesthetics demand.

In the first section, I provide an overview of the political and theoretical bases for the cultural studies approach to the notion of black film. Such a historicisation draws attention to the intellectual offerings which underlie the struggle and incremental presence of black British film in the mainstream. The second section introduces the valuable conceptualisation of ‘the Black Neoliberal Aesthetic’ with its theoretical weight drawing from the hegemonic analyses of Hall, Gilroy and others, in which crucial questions of post-multiculturalism, film and TV production, and political and media fervour over racialised criminality are analysed with this theoretical gesture. This term points to a visual mode in which popular, mediated constructions of blackness are narrativised and presented as positive black representation. Building on this, I seek to diagnose the hegemonic construction and manifestation of the aesthetic in the imbalanced, unanticipated cohabitation of black British film, neoliberalism and depictions of excessive blackness as social commentary. In my emphasis on its black male characters and promotional methods, the third section’s analysis of NW offers a detailed description of the specific textual and institutional practices which construct the aesthetic while recruiting the volitional involvement of black Britishness in its activation in its appeal to the struggle for representational plurality and within this, the BBC’s ‘label’ identity politics of the visual addressing of issues germane to Britain’s black community. I want to emphasise that it is not my intention to propose that the ideological agency of the black neoliberal aesthetic is located exclusively in NW’s crafting of its black identities. Rather, my close attention to the text draws focus to the ‘matters of black interest’ strategies both within and external to NW that construct the text as a black event. Such an endeavour aims to establish not only the hegemonic agency in NW in relation to desires and anxieties about black casualty, but also the racial context within which NW’s characters are situated. This is necessary for an understanding of NW’s complicity with hegemonic discourses of blackness, and I want to compliment such an analysis with a broader contextualisation of the film in the BBC’s valorising of blackness in dialogue with the dramatic elements of black criminality. Establishing this relationship allows for a sociological reading of NW’s black convention, and to consider its implications for its investment in the spectacle of black urban male death as the index of neoliberal aesthetic manifestations in contemporary black British film.

Black film and cultural studies

In 1988, 6 years after the emergence of Channel 4 and its remit to represent an alternative national identity had, for a fleeting moment, allowed for an unprecedented plurality in cultural representation through black self-authorship, black British filmmaker Isaac Julien, and Kobena Mercer (1988) wrote the introduction to The Last Special Issue on Race, published by the film journal Screen. Titled De Margin and De Centre, Julien and Mercer suggested that the period represented a significant juncture in cinematic representation of ‘cultural difference, identity and otherness – in a word, ethnicity’ (p. 2). With a fidelity to the cultural studies position that assessed cultural artefacts and representations as products of contestation, a concern with the racial politics that both de-marginalised black British film from the periphery while simultaneously ‘de-centring “discourses of cultural authority and legitimisation”’, (Mercer, 1988) underpinned its critical perspectives on black British film that were equally informed at the point of a ‘re-re-articulation of the category “black” as a political term of identification” (Ibid: 3). Here, a burgeoning and distinctive cultural studies analysis of black British film culture through Mercer (1988), Paul Willemen (1988) and an American influence through Jim Pines (1991), Coco Fusco (1988) and James Snead (1988) gave scholarly attention to the work of filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Julien and the broader black workshop movement. Here, the legitimisation of feeling and identity that black cinematic forms produced were reactive to and organised decisively by race, racism and the cultural politics of representation, predominantly centred on a demand for greater and fluid visibility and interrogation of the positive/negative representational dichotomy of mainstream depictions. As Mercer (1994) argued, for black filmmakers, the motivation was ‘to challenge the prevailing stereotypical forms in which blacks become visible either as “problems” or victims, always as some intractable and unassimilable other on the margins of British society and its collective consciousness’ (p. 82). My approach in exploring contemporary representations of black British filmic narratives vis-à-vis the neoliberal distilling of blackness to extract a political, cultural and aesthetic value is not limited to reviving historic debates in black British film, which is both unsuitable for the new conjunctural moment I am proposing, and beyond the ambition of this article. Rather, it is to periodise the conceptual landscape and singular importance of black British cinema’s presence in the black political consciousness prior to entering its further conjuncture, and Stuart Hall’s much anthologised ‘New Ethnicities’ (1988) remains the most influential survivor of this period. Whilst previous Hall(ian) approaches to media representation focused on an analysis of the modes in which the operations of mainstream media’s ‘sense making practices’ of race are placed within dominant ideological frameworks, most alive at conjunctural moments of political crisis and via (among other manifestations) systems of representation and image construction (Hall et al, 1978; Hall 1980, 1986) in New Ethnicities, the formation of a black politics is identified as comprising two distinct phases. First, the homogenising of ethnic difference under the unified category of ‘black’ as the natural defence mechanism against white racism and an exploding, the second phase of new ethnicities, severing the cords that ballast ‘black’ in place to allow for the penetration of cultural identity by a kaleidoscope of black experiences. While initially exhibiting trepidation in dichotomising these phases, insisting the two modalities ‘constantly overlap and interweave’ (Hall, 1988: 27), Hall (1988) eventually advocates the foregrounding of the newer, differentiated mode of social experience responsive to the particularities of identities founded on class, gender, nationhood and sexuality, heralding the end of the essentialism that had constituted ‘the black subject’. Hall’s interest in film culture as the optic in which the stability of ‘black’ can be both interrogated and dismantled should not be considered as an epiphany. Rooted much more in a Gramscian influence than the Lacanian-psychoanalytical model at the basis of ‘Screen Theory’, Hall considered film to have a more radical ideological potency than much of the scholarly output from CCCS suggests (Hall, 2019). In evacuating black identity from the cul-de sac of essentialism through an exploding of its ‘politically and culturally constructed category’, the implications of such a position on black cinema – that the responsible cultural analysis of black British film required close attention to the ethnic differences that fissure black identity – was the intellectual genesis for a concentrated investment in the decoupling of ‘black’ from nature in Hall’s (1988) deliverance of the term black from its point of fixity ‘in a system of negative equivalences’ (p. 28). For Hall et al. (1996), the struggle for visual representation was predicated on an examination of the objectification and ‘negative figuration’ dictating the representation of the black experience by the multimodal afflictions of racism, a contestation requiring strategies inimical to the rendering of blackness in popular film and TV as a ‘marginalised, simplified and stereotypical character’ (p. 442). Identifying an already-developing exploded representation of ethnicity in My Beautiful Laundrette, Passion of Remembrance and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid, the economic and political forces structuring the shifting, fluid and heterogeneous forms of racial identification produced no political guarantee germane to black identity. For Hall, this rendered baseless the claim to an organic righteousness in black film determined by its black authorship or content. As Hall (1988) goes on to contend:

Films are not necessarily good because black people make them. They’re not necessarily right on by virtue of the fact that they deal with the black experience. Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed political argument and debate. A critical politics, a politics of criticism (p. 28).

In Hall’s analysis, one could only discern what renders black films as good, worthy of consecration or ideologically progressive through first conceptualising what comprised the black experience and how this singular identity conferred onto the black populace could be exploded, made heterogeneous and refer to a lived experience of difference and modernity. While recognising the challenges located in the creation of a new discursive space as a counter-hegemonic strategy, for Hall, such a labour must precede any attempt to insulate black films in the protective fabric of biological blackness, a task immobilised by the twin vicissitudes of infrequency and subjectivity and the representational burden ascribed to black films (Mercer, 1988, 1994).

Hall, hegemony and black representation

Unlike scholars who have analysed black British film (and similar forms of cultural representation) as a dialectic between art and political struggle (Bakari, 2000; Mercer, 1994), as responsive to the black British experience (Bourne, 2005; Hall, 1988; Malik, 2002; Ross, 1996) or as the unequal outcome of the protracted politics of racial diversity devised by cultural institutions, such as Channel 4, the BBC, the UK Film Council and the BFI (Alexander, 2000; Gilroy, 1983; Hesmondhalgh and Saha, 2013; Malik, 2008; MacCabe, 1988; Mercer, 1988; Nwonka, 2020; Nwonka and Malik, 2018; Saha, 2015). I would like to consider the conditions of contemporary black British cinema on the resurrection of blackness as a utility for ideas of counter-hegemony. Within such guises, black film presents itself as a resistant generic category since its racial-prefix refers to black identity as a political category, while simultaneously performing as a textual mediator between the narrational ambitions of ‘oppositional’ film and neoliberalism’s subjective interests in the advancing of post-racial diversity. Accordingly, Malik (2013a) contends that black film often constructs its value by presenting itself as possessing a natural and unqualified didactic quality, a masquerade with a continued significance on the justifications for, and interactions with black screen identity, most commonly located in a binary framework of positive and negative representations. While Mercer (1990) denigrated the mainstream-aligned ‘monologic’ film as akin to ‘cultural mimicry and neo-colonial surrender’ (155) in favour of the ‘dialogic’ film, ruinous to racism and producing a critical racial dialogue situating black film not as art ‘but as politics’ (Mercer, 1990) for Malik (2013a), an organic claim to counter-hegemonic radicalness to remedy cultural misrepresentations has become an often-abortive ambition of black drama. While Malik’s general ontology emphasises the role of identity politics when assessing black British film’s claim to radicalness, Gilroy (2013) invests in the broader hegemonic aspects of this conjuncture through a theoretical approach coalescing on late capitalism’s phantom departure from racism, identifying the legacy of a post-multiculturalism at the marrow of neoliberalism that foregrounds the social and political context of its governance of ethnic difference in its tenuous disavowal of racial hierarchy. As he suggests:

Even if racism remains intractable elsewhere, it seems that neoliberal capitalism is ready to free itself from the fetters placed upon it by the historic commitment to pigmentocracy. Multiculturalism may have been pronounced dead by mere politicians but its sovereign authority has been usurped by the expanding cohorts of diversity management (24).

The historical progression towards diversity is in perfect alignment with Saha’s (2018) dismantling of the notion of BAME authorship of cultural production’s automatic correspondence with the formation of authentic cultural representation. Hall informs us that what is in operation in this politics of diversity is not outright subterfuge, but a success founded on the inconspicuous and sophisticated methods of persuasiveness extracted in his decoupling of hegemony from domination. For Hall (2019) hegemony, rather than a repressive force, actually requires the nation’s consent for its functioning. As a logical corollary to Hall’s analysis, my diagnosis of neoliberalism resuscitates Hall’s hegemonic reading in its seduction of racial difference, where the legitimacy of neoliberal reconstruction at the very fabric of cultural life emerges at its most powerful and undetectable when aligned to blackness. A conjunctural moment can be identified at the very end of the 20th century where the concept of institutional racism suddenly arrived into the political arena in an unprecedented way. The importance of the 1999 Macpherson Report and the subsequent policy interventions of the early 2000s proved conducive to a set of political agendas brought into practice through cultural production, most evident in the UK screen industries’ diversity agendas (Malik, 2013b). At the same time, the politics of multiculturalism evacuated anti-racism in favour of a hyper-celebration of diverse cultural practices (Lentin and Titley, 2011) neoliberalism was concretising its presence in its underpinning of a range of emergent political cultures – New Labour and post-multiculturalism, One Nation Conservatism and the post-race, austerity and most recently, Conservative national popularism (Wayne, 2018). In drawing attention to such underpinnings, I want to highlight how throughout this period neoliberalism established necessary cross-fertilisations with race and blackness. Within the spectacle of the management of race and ethnicity, the birth and evolution of diversity in the cultural and creative industries signalled the invocation of a political reconstruction of race, racism and cultural difference.

In my contention that neoliberalism’s dominant hold of contemporary life now very much includes blackness, black cultural products and black representations, my application of the term neoliberalism recognises Hall’s (2011) own description of its multiple variants. One such metamorphosis is in its proximity to the idea of racialised capital, in which predominantly white dominated institutions derive cultural, social or economic values from non-whiteness, in turn rupturing strategies for tangible social transformation (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gray, 2016; Leong, 2013). The UK screen industry’s rhetorical emphasis on BAME inclusion concretises a contradictory visual presence of blackness in popular screen culture, and I want to position neoliberalism in its ideological guise, one that advances an economic rationality for black cultural representation. The black neoliberal aesthetic operates as the nomenclature defining such a phenomenon when, both in the public sphere of narrating blackness and the voluntary participation of blackness in its production of images, moments and vernaculars of black social and cultural interest, a dynamic is achieved where the proactive response by the screen industries to black moral panics, requires the involvement and uptake of blackness itself in its narrating. When conceived under the rubric of diversity, black cultural value and social analysis, the dynamic can be legitimised and telegraphed as a collaborative black self-dramatisation. My use of contradiction refers to the aesthetics’ ability to sustain the values of liberalism, diversity and racial progress, while being equally committed to neoliberalism by serving a broader audience’s desire for the hegemonic version of the black ‘social condition’. From the perspective of the various media institutions that organise that participation, they are considered as both autonomous and relatively dependable organisations of the State to undertake such hegemonic social ordering. They may possess an economic dimension and insist on certain regulatory editorial and production conditions and decrees, but their its most distinctive role is in the instilling of values, objects, narratives and images of black identification for mainstream consumption. This gives the visage of a harmonious post-racial interaction between black representation and neoliberalism that the politics of diversity in laws, rendering the screen industries a key site where race politics correlate in tremendously powerful and influential ways. The proposition that neoliberalism’s interaction with the black struggle for filmic representation requires the voluntary participation and approval of blackness makes fertile political and industrial conditions for black film in a tenor (at least in discourse) that is inherently permissive rather than mandative. Thus, my chief concern is with method; the black neoliberal aesthetic is synonymous not with domination, but with hegemony. In Hall’s renovation of Gramsci’s (1989) core political concept, this refers to the model of politico-cultural leadership acquired to ensure a degree of persuasiveness, credibility and intellectual command of the racial agenda, and recruit previously oppositional sections of the population residing outside the power bloc into its sphere of influence (Hall, 1986). Hall (2019) recognised cultural hegemony’s ability to produce not domination, but instances of strategic contestation in ‘changing the dispositions and configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it’. This is not to imply that unanimity, uniformity or fixity in the application of black as a thematic prefix is the alpha and omega of the hegemonic agenda; this is an impossible task. Rather, it is how the UK screen industries – as the hegemon – are positioned at the axis of the policy agenda for black British representation. Indeed, as in Hall’s (2007) own conceptualising of neoliberal hegemony as a ‘process’ that constantly needs to be ‘worked on’, maintained, renewed and revised’ (p. 727), it is possible for the black neoliberal aesthetic to be reaffirmation of hegemony, but not in itself hegemonic; by this, the instability of black visual representation in the media that the politics of cultural diversity produces means the aesthetic is most fertile, and filmic blackness most vulnerable, in situations of social transition or disquiet. Resultingly, the black neoliberal aesthetic as a theoretical sensibility that sets the code for black expectations is not a fixed notion. It varies from artefact to medium and between political situations, when it is advantageous as audience expectations also morph in linearity with external factors, such as the promotional or social content of the text, or further, generic elements. Equally, neoliberalism’s ability to establish a renewed set of filmic expectations based on how blackness is politically, socially and economically framed and valorised by commodifying the social, cultural and political zeitgeist is particularly energised when concerned with issues of black morality. The primacy of media discourses on knife crime in the UK’s black communities offer a prime source for extracting cultural value via filmic representations of black social ‘address’. This typicality posits the black neoliberal aesthetic as reactive to hegemony, and constitutes the fundamental gesture that characterises neoliberalism’s filmic lexicalisation of black identity, a gesture most commonly detectable under the appearance of black as an inherently negated position – the principle black affliction is identity, announcing itself overwhelmingly at moments of social and cultural crisis.

What is produced when the mainstream ‘makes blackness’ under the auspices of diversity? While one can find similar methods in Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ (1979), it is Gramsci’s neo-Marxism for whom Hall derives a framework for understanding the continuance of hegemonic authority. ‘Incorporation’, where dominant ideology’s last resort to arrest the challenge of the oppositional force is identifying, responding to and controlling its desires and in turn gutting the oppositional force of all its potency, or quelling its desire to operate on its own volition by subsuming it to within its own designated areas, mandating its existence in the subjective interests of that ideology (Hall, 2016) is useful for thinking about the co-opting of the demands for black British filmic representation and inclusion. Such a position finds slender unity in Leong’s (2013) description of a system of racial capitalism as ‘the superficial process of assigning value to nonwhiteness’ (p. 2152). While amazingly integrated, black cultural value cannot be conceived as just an economic virtue for neoliberalism; it is also seen as a positive force both in its responsiveness to contemporary black moral crises and the visage of proactivity against the charge of under-representation. Indeed, much of what can be described as recent black British cinema has emerged with a shared set of value-driven co-ordinates, framed around either (or a combination of) the triumph of diversity and inclusion (A United Kingdom, Dir Amma Asante, 2016), cultural value though reference to canonical black literature (Yardie, Dir Idris Elba, 2018) or, as pertinent to this article, the UK screen industry’s desire for the black urban ‘gang’ film (Blue Story, Dir Rapman, 2019). This latter example indicates an imbalanced investment in a conscious need to instigate, embed and sustain black death as a highly visible and publicly identifiable aspect of the black British community, rather than to raise consciousness and caution to its social consequences. Therefore, cinematic and televisual blackness has not been ignorant of the rise of neoliberalism, and as neoliberal aesthetics are co-determined with hegemony, such aesthetic strategies are invisible. But as they equally possess the aestheticised imitationalism of blackness, the domestication of the hegemonic values they advance remain unchallenged, manifesting themselves as natural, racialised ‘common sense’ (see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982) to successfully integrate blackness into neoliberalism’s framework, albeit with a differentiated key, imagination, and presence. In other words, if black filmic representation is more susceptible to neoliberal incorporation, it is precisely because of its foundational function as an opponent to British racism that the deformations that take place at the point of incorporation involve a process of ‘asset stripping’. This deformation of the binaries of black filmic representation is precisely the rupture that sits at the axis of the Hall’s (1993) acceptance of black popular culture as ‘a contradictory space’ (p. 108). What now renders black British film homogenously black? Instinctively black? The response comes down to questions of what one thinks the black film is. While a somewhat now simplified definition by Malik (1996: 203–204) foregrounds black British film’s ‘blackness’ in absolute terms of authorship, experiential themes and audience in her description of black film that ‘draw on the manifold experience of, and which, for the most part are made by film-makers drawn from the Asian, African and Caribbean diaspora’, Malik’s taxonomy grants credence to my insistence that the black British film (in mainstream contexts) possesses a limited material existence, function or meaning before it is activated by its black viewer. This is not to deny the subjectivity of the black experience, nor to reject the existence of a topology of what black films may mean to different black people, but to point to the crucial intervention made by neoliberalism in the screen industry’s recognition of the black film that serves multiple agendas of racial identification and black social critique, and can satisfactorily evince its recognition of black representational struggle, particularly when packaged as black cultural value. Here, if the black audience can indeed respond in similar ways to the notion of black film based not exclusively on a shared experience but, in its essence, a unified demand for racial equality, the black film can be organised and circulated to engage and galvanise its viewer in a particular way. This is where one must take into account how the film is operating at a textual level, and returns us to the question of what a ‘good’ black film now constitutes. If black film as a cultural value exists in a landscape where black value can be subsumed into neoliberalism as both a cultural and political project, how does one sustain a questioning of the ethics of black film that is not eminent, not transcendent, nor relative? How do questions of black cultural value operate in an industrial context where blackness occupies a tenuous position in defining what black film’s cultural value is? Entering into an ontology of black film ethics (or an ontological basis for its ethics) refers to principles that motivate and marshal the mainstream production and consecration of black British film. If one voids a concept of black cultural value from requiring an ontology of that value, one’s ethics of black British film becomes pure faith; believe in something you have no basis for. My disavowal of an uncritical certainty of the screen industry’s moral principles is not to venture into a nihilistic forecasting of black British film when produced within the confines of the BBC, Channel 4 or the BFI. Rather, my contention is that the ambiguity that the politics of representation imbue introduces the idea that the basis for an ontology of the ethics of black film is a radical scepticism. Here, the divorce of black British cinema (as cultural value) being a proponent of ethics, and entering an ontology of its ethics is scepticism, and such a position is necessitated by the somewhat paradoxical, apolitical character of neoliberalism’s agenda for televisual and cinematic blackness. It depoliticises debates about blackness by concealing its ideological underpinnings in a language of cultural plurality (Nwonka and Malik, 2018). The stressing of scepticism as the basis for an evaluation of black British film is significant not only in its advocating for a critical approach that places emphasis on its susceptibility to neoliberal incorporation, but also in situating black British filmic representation into a number of contexts – as an outcome of policy initiatives to its movement of ‘black’ into a new point of fixity, on which the following section will now focus.

The BBC’s NW and black death

For the black neoliberal aesthetic, functioning as a pejorative, its filmic narrative possesses two primary ideological imperatives. First, it cultivates media discourses of representational alterity, and second, it demonstrates an instigative duty to address, in some form, issues of black socio-cultural interest. Therefore, the aesthetic is both textual and structural; it is brought into existence at the moment of the symbolic articulation of blackness. Under the auspices of the BBC’s vocabulary of BAME diversity, a regulatory framework is established in essentialising racial difference as a legitimate cultural project. NW is the adaptation of black mixed-race British author Zadie Smith’s critically acclaimed bestselling novel of the same name, published in 2012 by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin books which in 2016 became a 90-minute film screened on BBC Two and directed by Saul Dib, whose first feature Bullet Boy (BBC Films, 2005) was similarly the expedite product of a combination of the manoeuvres of diversity politics and the narrativisation of media discourses over black gun-crime in London (Nwonka and Malik, 2018). NW is the story of a cross-racial friendship between two women who grew up on the same North West London council estate that purports to narrate themes of race and class identity and difference within its ethnically diverse Brent locale. This combination of Zadie Smith, as an original avatar of New Labour’s post-multicultural idyll, with racially diverse film and television drama (particularly within public service broadcasting contexts) as narrational interventions at a conjunctural moment for black British identity is no novel feature. At the advent of New Labour’s broader diversity agenda, Smith’s 2000 debut novel White Teeth, set in the same North West London area of Brent was adapted by Channel 4 in 2002 as a four-part social-comedic celebration of the post-multicultural, post-race zeitgeist. It is of particular salience that its production took place at the moment of Channel 4’s critical turn away from multiculturalism, when in 2001 Channel 4 Chief Executive Michael Jackson justified the closing of its Multicultural Programmes Department on the disingenuous claim that the ‘minorities’ of the 1980s and 1990s that the channel was established to cater for had now been assimilated into the Britain’s mainstream (Malik, 2008; Nwonka, 2015). Similarly, the BBC Films production Shoot the Messenger (2006, Ngozi Onwurah) was produced in a moment ‘overwhelmed by public debates around ‘institutional racism’ and ‘hideous whiteness’ in the media (Malik, 2013a: 202). If the above examples point to both Hall’s (1996) analysis of black cultural products as a continuous site of contestation and Malik and Nwonka (2017) identification of the often disingenuous politics of post-2000s diversity as the organising principle of black filmic representation, the contingent nature of the presence of black British film, permitting blackness to conceive its own identity through the optics of the BBC while simultaneously reaping the primary dividends from ‘doing black cultural value’, acts as a critical vector for the opposing readings of its cultural intentions. While for some, such as the Guardian’s Joseph Harker, STM represented ‘one of the most racist, demeaning and misrepresentative films ever broadcast and commissioned by the BBC’ (quoted in Guardian, 4 July 2006), Roly Keating, the white BBC2 Controller responsible for the film’s terrestrial commissioning had described STM as a ‘landmark film’ with the potential to speak to ‘a generation of black Britons’ (quoted in Guardian, 8 December 2005). Such an ambitious trajectory of logic is afflicted by an obliging, sweeping presumption about the homogeneity of black British thinking in its perceived alignment and responsiveness to black Britain’s unified racial consciousness. As the responses show, the reaction to STM was divided not between racism and anti-racism, but between its racism being oblivious to or disregarding the potential reading of the film as such. Of course, the paucity of British film and TV explorations of the heterogeneous black British identities within contemporary British society and the racial inequalities within the screen industries that such representational brevity engenders evidences how both STM and NW commanded such symbolic attention. Relatedly, the desire of the BBC to achieve racial credibility in its visual identifications of blackness is located in their ability to commandeer when, and to what measure, Britain’s black community is nationally addressed. In the context of the BBC as a site of the construction of the national imaginary (Born, 2005), both NW and STM exhibit a definitive template for understanding the neoliberal desire for the positioning of black film as instinctively transgressive. The comparison to STM is therefore of particular, if limited utility. If STM’s anti-racist ambitions are compromised, paradoxically, by its positing of black people ‘as the problem’ (Malik, 2013a: 198) as my analysis will demonstrate, although NW is invested in addressing black British identities, it serves only as a progenitor for a heightened racial wokeness. That is to say, blackness is conceived not simply in terms of a positivity/negativity binary, but a necessary conduit in which ‘black’ is made steadfast in the process of cultural representation, and NW’s imperatives lie staunchly within this specific hegemonic utilisation of black British identity. In other words, NW and STM may be of differing epistemologies, but are on the same neoliberal continuum.

Such an analysis points to the complexities of a text that is the overarching product of the triangulation of cultural diversity, post-racism and black critical realism. Indeed, the ideology governing NW’s instituting of its subject matter, blackness, within its filmic universe is structured around a strategic imitationalism of public knowledge. Such an endeavour is aligned with the film’s circulation as part of a package of black British programming and specifically, one needs to contrast what is purported in the BBC’s promotional language with the textual analysis to follow. While not officially part of its programming, NW’s screening during the BBC’s Black and British Season rendered it a notable adjunctive contribution to the BBC’s essentialising of blackness throughout November 2016. Scheduled across BBC (2016) Two, Four, Radio and Online, the season promised to

feature bold, vibrant and provocative stories, overturning preconceptions and challenging orthodoxies. The season will cast a fresh light on our history, examining the contribution and impact of black people in UK as well as interrogating just what it means to be black and British today.

With the promise that the BBC (in the idea that ‘our stories’ suggests a relinquishing of representational command to black Britishness itself) will enlighten the nation with its narrational responses to the question of black British identity, such a declaration aligns with a recognition of neoliberalism as instinctively cosmopolitan; in this textual example, a heavily conditioned market is receptive to racialised constructions of black life. Thus, black British televisual and cinematic texts are not simply incidental products but matters of immediate social concern. They construct an entire cosmology for both defining and serving black Britishness on screen (additionally, in a two-part episode of the BBC series Silent Witness titled Lift Up Your Hearts broadcast in January 2019, the normally homogeneously white drama turns its lens to an excessive blackness where drugs, male urban violence and death threaten an otherwise placid, aspirational secondary school within London’s black community). Such thematic anomalies emerge emblematic of a strategy employed to produce the most imperative adjunctive rationalisation of black representation found in NW – the promise of narrative sociology. By situating its black social realism within didactic contexts, NW’s socio-political epistemologies emerge not to counter but to assist pro-hegemonic narratives held within the national sphere.

Screened on Monday, 14 November at 9 pm, NW is centred on the fractious friendship between Natalie and Leah as their lives splinter as the result of divergent class interests. However, I would like to focus my analysis on the contributions two other characters, the tragically intertwined young black men, Felix (OT Fagbenle) and Tyler (Charles Mnene) make to the formation of the aesthetic. My justification for such a focus is twofold. First, the aestheticisation of black death, upon which my use of the black neoliberal aesthetics finds an exemplar, is concentrated within Felix and Tyler’s storyline. In addition, it is this aestheticisation that sits within the general continuum of the cultural and generic hegemony of visualised urban male death, of which NW's male characterisations are constructed. Felix's storyline, as a reformed convict, former drug addict and aspiring mechanic is only tangentially connected to Smith’s novel where he is a peripheral character, and despite his presence being condensed into 20 minutes of screen time, he takes on a central significance. Emerging halfway through the film, Felix’s attitudinal gestures in these brief scenes – reconnecting with his wayward father through a shared appreciation of black music, history and culture, an intimate moment with his partner as he plans a new life devoid of criminality, buying a car for £450 and finally, fatally stabbed by Tyler – Felix’s character is gradually constructed as a paragon of black working-class reform. Therefore, NW is not immediately antagonistic to black masculinities, and the optimistic tonality of the scenes disallow direct associations with the visceral bleakness of British urban films (Nwonka, 2017; Malik and Nwonka, 2017). Within this narrational schema, self-actualisation as a discourse related to ideologies of assertiveness and a positive black national identity are inclusive. Deeply implicated in the neoliberal hegemony that NW strives to represent in Felix, personal redemption emerges as the acme of a reforming contemporary other to be ultimately subjected to the fatal rage of another version of blackness. In a similar screen time, NW introduces Tyler to the audience as Felix’s intra-race antithesis, and it is at this moment that the visage of neoliberal blackness becomes central to NW. Within this initial establishing of Tyler, his range of misdemeanours; drug-dealing, kicking a small dog to death in the street in full view of its terrified female owner and holding a vulnerable black women captive in theft, prostitution and domestic servitude, display the repertoire of the mediated black criminalised youth. The visual signifiers of North West London, identified in its heavily black population via the claustrophobia of a Bakerloo line Tube towards Kilburn Park where Felix first encounters Tyler, ballast the story in both an empirical reality and a cultural verisimilitude. Here, blackness as the local identity is blackness as a national identity, and NW consciously creates a sense of Kilburn as an immanently threatening environment, establishing the association of black danger as an a priori reality. The encounter in this moment is an excess of black convention. The identification of this convention is not reduced to the heated exchange between both black men when Tyler reacts aggressively in dismissing Felix’s polite request to him to ask his black accomplice (Nathan) to move his legs from across the seat to allow a heavily pregnant white woman to sit down, but when the woman, now sitting next to Tyler as Felix has offered his own seat to her, scolds Tyler, telling him you ought to be ashamed. Suddenly, such a rebuke, now from whiteness provokes a dramatic shift, a sense of shame and insult. As the camera frames Tyler in a close-up as he silently seizes up, his face becoming stern and upright and his eyes severe, excessive black convention manifests itself in an illogical, unprovoked black anger, a sudden, murderous intention on the slightest pretext of an internal humiliation. While Tyler’s dormant deadliness is resurrected by white admonishment, it is blackness that must pay the penalty. Moments later, as Tyler and Nathan run ahead of Felix as he exists the station, the required excessive black convention is accomplished as Felix, walking blissfully through Kilburn Park’s streets and unaware of the pending black danger, is ambushed by the duo. If an irrational sense of humiliation was the motivational factor for Tyler’s immediate descent into black anger, an excessive black convention guides his latest act, and in keeping with the black neoliberal aesthetics’ demand for an identifiable visage of common sense blackness, Felix is robbed of the remaining money he had from buying the car earlier that day. A sense of an uncontested fidelity to a black-on-black urban ‘lore’ is evident as Felix offers no defence, smiling as he nonchalantly hands over the cash in recognition that his new-found joy of life is not determined by relative wealth, capitalism or the violent repertoires of a blackness he has left behind. However, Felix becomes defiant as Tyler demands his chain. His refusal to surrender an item that possesses only sentimental value becomes the pretext for Tyler’s final action of excessive blackness. In a highly violent but equally poignant scene, Felix is stabbed. Framed from multiple angles, black death and the lacerated black body becomes central to the dramatising of a certain realism against the ultimately deadly, urban black youth. From the perspective of the audience, the ambivalence of blackness, and that of the blackness of that society both specifically and generally, are made explicit. As the camera oscillates between close and wide framing to create a sense of proximity and then distance, Felix’s body convulses momentarily as he bleeds to death in the middle of the street, uttering a final word (he breaths the name of his partner, Grace) as the now distant camera, having first mirrored his prone point-of-view, leaves Felix framed in the centre of a seemingly deserted urban landscape.

While an acceptable degree of credibility the audience requires within its generic framework is established, here defined as particular expectations (Neale, 2000) in NW, it is racial familiarity, rather than narrational demand that mediates this relationship. This is particularly salient when dealing with texts that purport to take us into the social real, although NW deviates from the more established codes of social realism that frame Black British drama (Forrest, 2013; Hallam and Marshment, 2000 ; Malik, 2013a; Nwonka, 2017). Blackness is framed as both the victimiser and victim; black death is both literal in Felix who is stabbed to death, and metaphored in Tyler in the wastefulness of the black youth existence and the spectacle of black death as an inevitable conclusion of the filmic black neoliberal aesthetic, which refers to a politics of race invested in the colour co-ordinating of the imagination as much as the physicality of black skin. A continuation of the preoccupation with the black mugger and rioter that mediated racist characterisations of ‘folk devils’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Hall et al., 1978) begins to morph into another racialised character that enters the stage of popular consciousness, one conceived precisely by pathological intertwining of ideas about the relationship between blackness and knife crime. However, the actualising of the black neoliberal aesthetic is located in its influential interaction with the scene’s chiming with the hegemonic claim of black death, here depicted via the recognisable, iconographic topicality of black-on-black criminality in London, as an inevitable outcome of a particular psychocultural incubus within the black British males. Such an aestheticisation of black conflict guiding the cultural value of NW’s mediating of the encounter with the racialised other constitutes the moment of black neoliberal aesthetic as a social spectacle; the foregrounding of excessive black convention or ‘common sense’ in determining and presenting a particular neoliberal black reality. In other words, the aesthetic, as black spectacle, is extra-representational; it exists outside of cultural representation and is experienced only through the visual (in this example, fictional) reproduction of thought. However, given the instability of the presence of black film, mediated by the equally unstable investment in contemporary black moral concerns (here, London’s knife crime epidemic) the neoliberal reconstituting of the essential black identity is never content or consistent, invoking constant repetition. Resultingly, such atonal and monothematic representations survive as black cultural offerings, which in effect affirm that the centring of black death in NW is not merely a negative gesture, but retains a parallel, positive dimension of black screen presence, of its blackness as social commentary, as realism. The representation of black death in NW’s cultural imaginary and imitation demonstrates the interaction of these dimensions; the black neoliberal aesthetic as the moment when political and institutional arrangement, the textual quality, its circulation, the audience, and the common sense, colour coordinating of the imagination become deeply aligned.

It is important to acknowledge that the ideological ambition of NWs fictional crafting of black death is not resolution, but a modus vivendi; that is, the use of black death as crucial for segregating its two black masculine identities. The fair-skinned Felix is marked by moral uprightness, chivalry, sincerity and respect, and the dark-skinned Tyler the ambassador for black urban violence, and this distinction is crucial for understanding how both identities constitute a neoliberal regime over NW. Tyler functions as the authentic representative for the authority of the ‘doubling of fear and desire’ (Hall, 1988: 28) via his ability to perform excessive blackness within a broader ‘horizon of expectations’(Ellis, 1981) and as the locus in which ‘contradictory feelings toward black subjects can be felt simultaneously’ (Back, 1996: 172). Here, a spectacle of the lacerated black body as prime for visual injury derives its legitimacy and authority through mainstream media’s ability to inscribe the moral panic’s zone of crisis with an imitational character and a protocol of visual engagement. In this process, Tyler succeeds in producing another fatal engagement for and with blackness within the representational and epistemic institutional spaces of the BBC, gaining its cultural value through black mortality, a discourse stabilised by the protracted narrative of cultural diversity. However, Tyler’s representation ventures beyond both racial stereotype and ‘mythification’ (Snead, 1994). What is different about his representation is the methods which draw attention to both the processes by which he is aestheticised and excessed and their wider ideological function; the possibility that both our protagonist and antagonist possess characterisations that are actually sanctioned by the conjunctural moment. Tyler’s anger, characterised in NW’s juxtaposition of positive blackness with urban death reaches its aesthetic apex via the cultural verisimilitude that is proposed through Tyler’s iconography at the conclusion of the scene on the Tube, where he places his hoodie over his head before murdering Felix. Prior to this moment, the black youth is unmasked, but when masked, NW produces a specific moment of black neoliberal aestheticisation. Tyler, now unidentifiable within the diegesis, becomes recognisable beyond this to the audience already invested in the aestheticised racial universe. Tyler’s blackness is reduced to the pathological, preferred and identifiable relationship with society. In both examples, Tyler and Felix, the black body becomes a political body without politics, paradoxically disembedded from the more complex assemblages that constitute black British identity, while rupturing potential circuits of criticism for a celebration and cultural resonance predicated upon the porousness of black filmic representation. But from another perspective, what is essential to the aesthetic is its textual vulnerability. The hood-placing becomes a ritualistic, conventional prelude for both the verisimilitudinous rationalisation and acceptability of an impending performance of black death. The text’s surface is real, and therefore fragile, offering a sense of immanence, where Tyler’s murderous identity must be summoned for an authenticity funnelled through NW’s intimate association with black conventional information, and the presence of a black crime/death-invoked sensory emotionalism sustains itself beyond the text as a result of the inexplicable hold of discourses of black violence on the British social imagination. However, the aesthetics’ resistance to critique is assisted by the combinational symbolism of Zadie Smith, both in her overt presence across the BBC’s publicity and marketing strategy for the film and as the unofficial orator of the ‘modern black British experience’ (quoted in Guardian, 11 November 2016). This liberates NW from the charge of racial portraiture and provides the authentic black patina to stabilise its contradictions under the unifying, persuasive elements of black cultural value. ‘Black’ is instilled as NW’s centrifugal force, and race becomes mobile to works in the subjective interest of its production context to defend against any charges of negative racial characterisation directly threatening Smith’s blackness as the symbolic fulcrum of the BBC’s quixotic project for black identity. This is assisted by a critical reception in which ‘urban’ and ‘relevant’ function as racial metaphors invaluating NW’s status as black social inquiry (Guardian, 14 November 2016; New Statesman, 14 November 2016). As death is utilised as blackness’ basic raw matter, NW becomes a visual reference to the hegemony it claims to reject. To situate this argument in the context of the still unresolved Hall(ian) analysis, let me reemphasise that my attempt to address the uncertainty that is exhibited in NWs articulations of a myopic blackness within its narrow representational spaces is to identify the modality of the screen industry’s fragile alignment to contemporary blackness. This finds its most dominant expression at the level of fictional narratives and, in keeping with the general logic of the politics of diversity, marked by a range of contradictions. Ambiguity becomes the structural condition that both inhibits and enables the black British film from the point of inception, permitting black criminality, and resultingly black death, as an inextricable part of the Black British identity’s experiential space.

Conclusion

As UK screen industry diversity continues to register and underpin black filmic representation, NW becomes a key analogue for the possibility of deriving an analysis of black British film that situates neoliberalism at its structural and textual level, and how this is directly indexed to the cultural, material and epistemic praxis of mainstream black cultural value. That the adamantine practices of neoliberalism have aligned themselves with the potency of cultural diversity presents a conjunctural challenge for the relations of representation; it may no longer possess the necessary displacement mechanisms required to disembed ‘black’ as a biological category prefixing the screen industry’s new adjustments to black inclusion. That neoliberalism has a more abstract, universal agenda for black British film, particularly when in dialogue with the reconfiguration of black screen identity, means such contestation is always likely to concede to neoliberalism’s mobilisation of the popular imagination via ‘good’ black films that represent the performance of a racial diversity attuned to the urgency of black themes. This ability to usher into an impasse the struggle against stereotypical realities or the denial of access to representation is not exclusive to the twin tenets of Hall’s representational regimes; it poses complications for responding to excessive aesthetic conditions within black visual representation. Indeed, challenging the black neoliberal aesthetic itself on the premise that it presents an excessive, hegemonic blackness is ineffective; as I have argued, such a challenge is now constructed into its modes of operation. The emergence and separation of black death from a political ontology of black death in a moment of social crisis is particularly useful for neoliberalism, permitting the expansion of its logic to penetrate the once sacrosanct province of black film. In doing so, it produces an intensification of the contradictions primarily located in those who accept neoliberalism as a useful (albeit primitive, immature and technocratic) apparatus for cultural diversity and black representation, while as blackness becomes increasingly present in the screen industry’s representational ethics, black male death becomes an accepted part of the national identity via the white synthetisation of black spectacles. In NW, it produces an endorsement of the very ideologies it claims to counter. The black neoliberal aesthetic is the index of an amalgamation of a range of influential cultures; textual, economic, political and social that find a stylistic manifestation. The black British film, irrespective of its temporal biological, cultural or industrial definitions, exists not in a benign vacuum, but within a complex co-constitutive arrangement with neoliberalism at its pivot. Therefore, its extensional instrumentalisation of excessive black conventional aesthetics can only be usefully and appropriately diagnosed within the context of neoliberal hegemonic power, a framework that evades and articulates a space outside of neoliberal ideology to critically analyse the ecology of black British film and the implications of this in how blackness is understood.