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ECS0010.1177/1367549420973204European Journal of Cultural StudiesNwonka

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European Journal of Cultural Studies

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The black neoliberal © The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549420973204
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Clive James Nwonka

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Abstract
This article examines the BBC film NW as a locus for the emergence of a conditional
aesthetic of black ‘convention’. I focus on its articulations about black identities to
argue that such strategies are symptomatic of a hybridising of neoliberalism and
themes of black consciousness in the UK screen industries. The black neoliberal
aesthetic describes the mediated outcomes of the commodification of black images
and popular narratives for the purpose of both black social engagement and public
voyeurism. In identifying the co-opting of ideas of black cultural value by neoliberal
hegemony, and accentuating the co-dependency between these in the narrating
of the black British experience, I suggest that an influential dynamic constructing a
particularly effective justification for black British film allows for a theorisation of the
relationship between neoliberalism and mainstream representations of blackness,
and how excessive articulations about black moral panic and casualty in NW map
onto present-day social concerns over racial representation and cultural diversity.

Keywords
BBC, black, diversity, film, hegemony, neoliberalism, race

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 inclu-
sion, 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

Corresponding author:
Clive James Nwonka, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: c.j.nwonka@lse.ac.uk
2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

the institutional basis for the presence of black Britishness on screen. However, neolib-
eral 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 stereo-
typical 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 nar-
row 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, herald-
ing 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 identi-
fication 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 criminal-
ity’ 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 crim-
inality 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 aestheticisa-
tion. However, while Hall et al. endeavoured to situate an empirical analysis within a
theoretical approach influenced predominantly by Althusser, Marx, Barthes and Gramsci,
Nwonka 3

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 sec-
tor’s institutions at the centre of his analyses. Saha (2018) is all too aware of such analyti-
cal 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 broad-
casters 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 ‘deconstruc-
tion’ (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 exem-
plar for understanding how a black neoliberal aesthetic is visually represented in a racial-
ised 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 atten-
tion to the intellectual offerings which underlie the struggle and incremental presence of
black British film in the mainstream. The second section introduces the valuable con-
ceptualisation 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
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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, unantici-
pated cohabitation of black British film, neoliberalism and depictions of excessive
blackness as social commentary. In my emphasis on its black male characters and pro-
motional 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 strug-
gle 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 empha-
sise that it is not my intention to propose that the ideological agency of the black neo-
liberal 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 endeav-
our 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 con-
textualisation 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 socio-
logical reading of NW’s black convention, and to consider its implications for its invest-
ment 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 author-
ity 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 legitimi-
sation of feeling and identity that black cinematic forms produced were reactive to and
organised decisively by race, racism and the cultural politics of representation,
Nwonka 5

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 ste-
reotypical 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 col-
lective 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 con-
sciousness prior to entering its further conjuncture, and Stuart Hall’s much anthologised
‘New Ethnicities’ (1988) remains the most influential survivor of this period. Whilst pre-
vious 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 construc-
tion (Hall et al, 1978; Hall 1980, 1986) in New Ethnicities, the formation of a black poli-
tics 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 kaleido-
scope 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 concen-
trated 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, simpli-
fied 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,
6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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 right-
eousness 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 neces-
sarily 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 rep-
resentation) 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 medi-
ator between the narrational ambitions of ‘oppositional’ film and neoliberalism’s subjec-
tive 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 pro-
ducing 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
Nwonka 7

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 govern-
ance 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 cor-
respondence 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 recon-
struction 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 polit-
ical 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 politi-
cal 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 cul-
tural practices (Lentin and Titley, 2011) neoliberalism was concretising its presence in its
underpinning of a range of emergent political cultures – New Labour and post-multicul-
turalism, One Nation Conservatism and the post-race, austerity and most recently,
Conservative national popularism (Wayne, 2018). In drawing attention to such underpin-
nings, I want to highlight how throughout this period neoliberalism established neces-
sary 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 cul-
tural difference.
In my contention that neoliberalism’s dominant hold of contemporary life now very
much includes blackness, black cultural products and black representations, my applica-
tion 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
8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

that advances an economic rationality for black cultural representation. The black neolib-
eral 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 poli-
tics correlate in tremendously powerful and influential ways. The proposition that neolib-
eralism’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 syn-
onymous 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 out-
side the power bloc into its sphere of influence (Hall, 1986). Hall (2019) recognised cul-
tural 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 aes-
thetic 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
Nwonka 9

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 lexicali-
sation of black identity, a gesture most commonly detectable under the appearance of
black as an inherently negated position – the principle black affliction is identity, announc-
ing 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 under-
standing the continuance of hegemonic authority. ‘Incorporation’, where dominant ide-
ology’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 ide-
ology (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 con-
scious 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 hegem-
onic 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 differen-
tiated 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
10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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 some-
what 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 galva-
nise 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 pro-
duction 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 cul-
tural value) being a proponent of ethics, and entering an ontology of its ethics is scepti-
cism, and such a position is necessitated by the somewhat paradoxical, apolitical
character of neoliberalism’s agenda for televisual and cinematic blackness. It depoliti-
cises 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 criti-
cal 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.
Nwonka 11

The BBC’s NW and black death

For the black neoliberal aesthetic, functioning as a pejorative, its filmic narrative pos-
sesses two primary ideological imperatives. First, it cultivates media discourses of repre-
sentational 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 pro-
ject. 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 narra-
tivisation 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 broadcast-
ing 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 produc-
tion Shoot the Messenger (2006, Ngozi Onwurah) was produced in a moment ‘over-
whelmed 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 cul-
tural 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,
12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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 nation-
ally 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 understand-
ing 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 prob-
lem’ (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/nega-
tivity 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 hegem-
onic 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 chal-
lenging 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 prod-
ucts 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
Nwonka 13

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 rationali-
sation of black representation found in NW – the promise of narrative sociology. By
situating its black social realism within didactic contexts, NW’s socio-political episte-
mologies 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 hegem-
ony of visualised urban male death, of which NW’s male characterisations are con-
structed. 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 cul-
ture, 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 immedi-
ately antagonistic to black masculinities, and the optimistic tonality of the scenes disal-
low direct associations with the visceral bleakness of British urban films (Nwonka, 2017;
Malik and Nwonka, 2017). Within this narrational schema, self-actualisation as a dis-
course 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
14 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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 heav-
ily 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 mani-
fests 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 resur-
rected 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 reper-
toires 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 lacer-
ated black body becomes central to the dramatising of a certain realism against the ulti-
mately 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 frame-
work 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 particu-
larly 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 imag-
ination 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
Nwonka 15

enters the stage of popular consciousness, one conceived precisely by pathological inter-
twining 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 recognis-
able, iconographic topicality of black-on-black criminality in London, as an inevitable out-
come 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 aes-
thetic, as black spectacle, is extra-representational; it exists outside of cultural representa-
tion 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 rep-
resentations 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 dimen-
sion of black screen presence, of its blackness as social commentary, as realism. The repre-
sentation of black death in NW’s cultural imaginary and imitation demonstrates the
interaction of these dimensions; the black neoliberal aesthetic as the moment when politi-
cal 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 pro-
tracted narrative of cultural diversity. However, Tyler’s representation ventures beyond
both racial stereotype and ‘mythification’ (Snead, 1994). What is different about his rep-
resentation 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
16 European Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

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 soci-
ety. 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 mur-
derous 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 inexplica-
ble 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 meta-
phors 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 indus-
try’s fragile alignment to contemporary blackness. This finds its most dominant expres-
sion 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 con-
dition 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 represen-
tation, 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
Nwonka 17

directly indexed to the cultural, material and epistemic praxis of mainstream black cul-
tural 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 adjust-
ments 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 mobilisa-
tion 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 complica-
tions 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, imma-
ture 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 syntheti-
sation 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 diag-
nosed 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.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Clive James Nwonka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9916-5141

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Biographical notes
Clive James Nwonka is an LSE Fellow in Film Studies in the Department of Sociology at the
London School of Economics and Political Science. His work explores issues of realism, race,
class and representation in British and American cinema, and the institutional frameworks of the
British film and TV industries. His published research includes writings on Black British cinema,
film and architecture, and diversity policy. He is the co-editor of the book Black Film British
Cinema II (2020) and the author of the forthcoming book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of
British Urban Film (2021).