Black cultural intermediaries: Difference, neoliberalism and the negotiation of Black cultural value

Abstract

In recent years, the UK screen industries have exhibited a renewed interest in racial difference that can be understood as the outcome of policy interventions into the unequal labour practices within film production and film culture. This has emerged with new modes of Black cultural visibility that have accompanied the increased presence of mainstream, publicly funded feature films. Here, the increasing body of Black filmic practitioners who have now occupied the creative status of writer-director is an outcome of not just the expanded and strategic racial equality agenda within the UK film industry, nor the intrinsic need to extend the representation of Black identities and related themes and characterisations within the screen industrial landscape. In identifying a conjunctural shift in Black cultural politics and the production of Blackness as a cultural value through film as a linear social and political phenomenon that has produced a heightened moment of cultural visibility, this article identifies how the presence of industrial actors as creative practice within Black film production and presentation has inaugurated a glacial but no less significant period of industrial reconfiguration and subsequently, new forms of cultural meaning being ascribed to the cultural image of the Black writer-director. As Black Britishness comes into a greater industrial visibility in the film sector, its entanglements with neoliberalist logics of the marketed individual frame the Black cultural intermediary as the inevitable outcome of Black cultural identity’s continued trajectory into the popular.