Celluloid Documents: migrant women in Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs and Twilight City, and Sankofa Film and Video Collective’s Dreaming Rivers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses representations of immigrant West Indian women in the films Handsworth Songs, Twilight City, and Dreaming Rivers by the black British film collectives Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, respectively. Black Audio and Sankofa emerged in the mid-1980s as activists and innovators in the fields of video and film arts. Formed by male and female filmmakers of African, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian descent, they were born out of the struggles waged by black Britons in the 1980s to shape a new cultural politics and a new politics of representation. An important stage in the ongoing struggle to gain acknowledgement of diversity within “the black British experience,” and to gain control over representations of that diversity, was that of breaking the historic silence of black British women of Caribbean origins. As a result of the new cultural politics, and for the first time, black women artists gained the means to give voice to their experience and their concerns through the medium of film. At a moment when debates on representation necessarily provoked questions of racial, national, ethnic, and individual identity, the impact of migration on black women’s identity formation became a pressing concern, if not to the community as a whole, then certainly to the women. The paper evaluates the two films as responses to these debates by filmmakers committed to giving voice to black women.