Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film

Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film by Nwonka has been longlisted for the Kraszna-Krauz Foundation's Moving Image Book Award 2024. It offers the first dedicated analysis of Black British urban cinematic and televisual representation as a textual encounter with Blackness, masculinity, and urban identity. Nwonka convenes a dialogue between Film and Television Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Sociology, and Criminology to advance a more expansive reading of the Black British urban text. He identifies Black urban textuality as conditioned by a bidirectionality rooted in historical and contemporary questions of race, racism, and anti-Blackness and attentive to the social dynamics that render the screen as a site of Black recognition, authorship, and authenticity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 21 September 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Longlisted for the Kraszna-Krauz Foundation's Moving Image Book Award 2024, Nwonka's Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film offers the first dedicated analysis of Black British urban cinematic and televisual representation as a textual encounter with Blackness, masculinity, and urban identity. The book foregrounds the textual Black urban identity as a historical formation and draws on a range of theoretical frameworks to examine the emergence and continued social, cultural, and industrial investment in the fictitious and non-fictitious images of Black urban identities and geographies. Nwonka convenes a dialogue between the disciplines of Film and Television Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Sociology, and Criminology, venturing beyond the perennial and simplistic optic of racial stereotype to advance a more expansive reading of the Black British urban text as the outcome of a complex conjunctural interaction between social phenomena, cultural policy, political discourse, and the continuously shifting politics of Black representation. Through the analysis of a number of texts and political and socio-cultural moments, Nwonka identifies Black urban textuality as conditioned by a bidirectionality rooted in historical and contemporary questions of race, racism, and anti-Blackness, as well as attentive to the social dynamics that render the screen as a site of Black recognition, authorship, and authenticity. Analysed in the context of realism, social and political allegory, urban multiculture, Black corporeality, and racial, gender, and sexual politics, Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film offers a critical and timely exploration of the complex and multifaceted nature of Black urban representation in contemporary media.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9798765105849