The War of Naming the Problem: Black Audio Film Collective and Political Aesthetics

他的研究旨在填补现有文献中关于开创性的黑人有声电影集体的空白，这是一个活跃于1982-1998年之间的英国黑人电影制作集体。他们的活动跨越了撒切尔主义和新工党主义的巩固，这一时期对我们今天如何看待英国的种族、国家和艺术产生了深远的影响——无论是在物质上、智力上还是审美上。他们试图通过电影和纪录片研究社会动荡和文化表达来回应英国社会的转变。批判性地研究他们的作品对于加深我们对英国黑人艺术和反种族主义斗争的理解至关重要。虽然BAFC广受赞誉，但对这个集体的研究还没有一本书那么长。大多数关于BAFC的解释性文献并没有超越审美解释而进入更广泛的社会力量。同样，这一时期的社会历史批判作品也没有把BAFC作为他们的持续对象。这个项目试图通过综合这两个层次的分析来克服这种二元对立，同时以一种新颖的方式集中在他们作品中的音频和电影上。我的问题是，仔细阅读BAFC的作品，从美学角度看，我们能从80年代和90年代英国资本主义的重构中得到什么启示？相应地，对这种重构的历史和理论解读可以告诉我们这些作品。这需要一个双重的研究对象：首先，英国电影学院丰富的电影档案，其中许多尚未被观看；第二，唯物主义和后殖民主义对政治、文化和社会的解读。使用这些分析工具，本项目将有助于英国后殖民和文化研究的迫切和重新出现的领域，提出新的历史和美学问题，关于一个著名的，但研究不足的语料库。

his research aims to fill a gap in the existing literature on the seminal Black Audio Film Collective, the black British filmmaking collective active between the years 1982-1998. Their activity spans the consolidation of Thatcherism and New Labourism, a period which had deep consequences - material, intellectual, and aesthetic - for how we think about race, nation, and the arts in the UK today. They sought to respond to the transformations of UK society by studying social upheavals and cultural expression through film and documentary. A critical study of their oeuvre is vital to deepening our understanding of black arts and anti-racist struggle in the UK.While the BAFC is widely lauded, there is no book-length study of the collective. Most interpretative literature on the BAFC does not move beyond aesthetic interpretation to the broader social forces out of which it emerges. Equally, no critical works on the social history of the period take BAFC as their sustained object. This project seeks to overcome this binary by synthesizing these two levels of analysis, while concentrating in a novel way as much on the audio as on the film in their works.I ask what a close aesthetic reading of the BAFC works can tell us about the restructuring of British Capitalism in the '80s and '90s. Correspondingly, what a historical and theoretical reading of this restructuring can tell us about these works. This requires a two-fold object of study: first, the BAFC's rich archive of films, of which many remain unwatched; second, materialist and post-colonial readings of politics, culture, and society.Using these analytic tools, this project will contribute to the urgent and re-emerging field of British postcolonial and cultural studies, rendering new historical and aesthetic questions possible regarding a renowned yet understudied corpus.