Cultural discourses and practices of institutionalised diversity in the UK film sector: ‘Just get something black made’

Abstract

‘Diversity’ is an evolving dimension of discursive debates within publicly funded parts of the UK media. This article considers how representations of racial diversity in cinema were articulated in a particular moment in recent history. It traces the relationship between the broader New Labour neoliberal agenda of the late 1990s and the UK Film Council’s (UKFC) New Cinema Fund, the key funding mechanism for supporting black British cinema at the time. The authors suggest that the New Cinema Fund’s ‘institutional diversity’ agenda represented a symbolic effort by both the UKFC and UK public service broadcasters to redevelop black British film vis-a-vis a plethora of cultural imperatives oriented around the notion of ‘social inclusion’. The nature of this intervention, it is argued, was strongly influenced by the 1999 Macpherson Report, which identified ‘institutional racism’ within the fabric of the UK’s organisations. The article examines how such an ‘institutional diversity’ agenda emerged within the production context of a BBC Film/UKFC production, Bullet Boy (2005), thus generating a rearticulated black British cinema that was deeply imbricated in the highly politicised contexts outlined.