Abstract
In his essay film, The Stuart Hall Project, Akomfrah resumes his exploration of the multi-layered screen approach to political aesthetics, offering a complex portrait of his subject's abiding concern with social inequality, tracking its manifestations in the 'conjugated cultural realities' of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism down to its vanishing point in the 'neo-liberal problem space' of present-day Britain. Paying close attention to the use of associative editing, Vertovian color montage, and contrapuntal rhythmicity, this paper highlights the film's critical take on the coalescence of multicultural drift, the slow moving glacier of feminism, and the paradigm of the diaspora into three-layered screens through which positional politics is redefined within the framework of Présence Africaine and the larger trajectory of contemporary African and diasporan artists, intellectuals, and activists.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 293-308 |
| Journal | African and Black Diaspora |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 11 Sept 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Sept 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Impact: The paper offers a reading of John Akomfrah's essay film "The Stuart Hall Project," which uses historical footage to chronicle the biography and intellectual life of noted Jamaican-British cultural critic, Stuart Hall over five decades, starting in the 1950s. It focuses mainly on Hall's abiding concern with social inequality in Britain as a colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial and neoliberal powerhouse, and with the internal implications of its shift towards an unavoidable multiculturalism. Besides the filmmaker's attention to Hall's critique of the workings of "power, knowledge and the regime of truth," the essay also grapples sensitively and insightfully with Akomfrah's cinematic coding and structuring of his material and his use of montage, coloring and sound in this wide-ranging historicizing of the present that constitutes Hall's oeuvre.Keywords
- Communication, cultural and media studies