Theatres of memory; un-silencing the past – Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ anthology

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Steve McQueen’s collaborations with the BBC to examine how his ‘Small Axe’ anthology of five films represents Black British experiences in Britain, charting discrimination, racially motivated violence, police persecution, and activism for social justice as well as ordinary life. The anthology chronicles events between 1968 to the early 1980s and centres anti-racist activism, resistance struggles, and key debates around Black British subjectivity. From a contemporary twenty-first-century lens, McQueen intervenes in important public debates, refracting them in the context of today, highlighting the ongoing importance and relevance of this history in Britain’s contemporary moment, especially in a time of increased racially motivated violence fuelled by ethno-nationalism. Arguably, through the platform of public service broadcasting, these interventions position McQueen in wider public debates and link him into Black British public intellectual traditions. The article argues that by focusing on key moments and events in Black British history, under-represented in mainstream narratives, and by collaborating with BBC One, McQueen opens up crucial questions about whose history is centred and how these events are opened up to wider public audiences. The article examines how McQueen intervenes in important public debates by centring the margins, and argues that the ‘Small Axe’ anthology challenges received understandings of Britain’s recent past and contributes to necessary conversations around social justice, equality and inclusion, especially important to ongoing debates around citizenship, belonging, and conceptions of Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Steve McQueen
• black British intellectual history
• BBC
• public service broadcasting
• ‘small axe’ anthology

Steve McQueen has been a long-standing participant in Britain’s cultural life as a filmmaker and artist. Examining his work in relation to considerations of the public intellectual offers new insights into his work, its reception, but also the demands it makes on its viewers and readers. Indeed, in 1999, when the Institute of Contemporary Arts hosted the first survey of McQueen’s work, curator Okwui Enwezor considered McQueen to be ‘one of the few young artists [who] have so convincingly entered their work into the public sphere with so emphatic a purpose and concentration’ (Kim and Moran 2020, 4). Steve McQueen’s art straddles different forms of artistic expression, ranging from film to photography and sculpture, yet a broader public audience would have encountered his work’s exponential explorations of the world through the moving image. A winner of the 1999 Turner Prize, he is perhaps best known nationally and internationally for his feature films, Hunger (2008), Shame (2011) and the Academy Award-winning 12 Years A Slave (2013). His works have been widely exhibited, discussed, and debated across the globe, and through his work he has made key interventions into public debates in the UK and elsewhere. He also very much broke through to wider international audiences with the success of 12 Years A Slave.

As this article will outline, the ‘Small Axe’ anthology (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e) opens up productive pathways to think about McQueen in terms of the parameters of the public intellectual. Furthermore, McQueen’s work might also be helpful to think through some of the complexities associated with the parameters of transnationalism. As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden point out, ‘one of the central aspects of transnationalism as a critical discourse is its dialectical engagement with – rather than simple rejection of – ideas of the national’ (2006, 13). The ‘Small Axe’ anthology is exponentially focused on the Black British experience of making a home in Britain, racist discrimination, and forging a life in spite of the obstacles that had to be overcome. In that representation of hostility in relation to migration, McQueen holds up a mirror to society and deeply questions notions of the national and the binaries often associated with national belonging, choices that are demanded by the state as allegiances are constantly tested and questioned. Here, there are larger questions, then, how a Black British identity comes into being, but also how it relates and extends into affiliations with the island states of the Caribbean and the transnational networks of the Black Power movement.

The ‘Small Axe’ anthology is comprised of five films Mangrove (2020d); Lovers Rock (2020c);Red, White, and Blue (2020e);Alex Wheatle (2020a); and Education (2020b). It was a ten-year project, which McQueen began working on shortly after completing Hunger. The anthology was designed to represent and bring into public consciousness the complex modalities and difficult process of making Britain home. To some degree, in the way in which the BBC framed the anthology in their publicity and when considered alongside a range of documentaries broadcast in the wake of the films’ scheduling, they also serve an educational function by focusing on important events, court cases, social justice movements as much as on everyday lived experiences. Through such a lens and in their social realist aesthetics the films are embedded in an attempt to preserve this history and serve as a reminder of the long legacy of campaigning and activism by Britain’s black community, with which a younger generation and wider public is less acquainted. In this sense, McQueen’s films make an important intervention into public debates, in which past and present intersect signalling how we arrived in our present moment, which importantly align with the considerations of the public intellectual. An element that rings through loudly and clearly is the need to preserve these histories not only in archival collections, such as those housed in the George Padmore Institute and Black British Cultural Archive, on which the films’ scriptwriters drew, but also how to make these histories available and accessible. It is here where the medium of film is uniquely placed and where the format of film for television and its aesthetic modalities is interestingly animated by McQueen and extended in the documentaries, which he coproduced or directed.

The first film in the anthology, Mangrove (2020d) is set in the early 1970s, in the aftermath of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, rising community tensions and increasing racial profiling and violent encounters with the police. Mangrove centres on the Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill that gives the film its title. Opened in 1968, by Frank Crichlow, the restaurant soon became a community hub and attracted intellectuals and activists. The local police frequently raided the restaurant, and though initially granted a late licence, the council later sought to revoke it. The continual harassment Crichlow experienced led to him receiving support from the British Black Panthers, which took inspiration from the American organisation, and led to the establishment of The Action Committee for the Defence of the Mangrove. The film culminates in the protest march of 9 August 1970 from the Mangrove to several police stations over the undue and heavy-handed police attention the restaurant received. Protesters were met with much police force, and Crichlow along with eight further protesters including Barbara Beese, Rupert Boyce, Rhodan Gordon, Elton Anthony Carlisle Inniss, Rothwell Kentish, and Godfrey Millett were arrested for inciting a riot and causing a disturbance. Among them were also the campaigner Darcus Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe. Known as the Mangrove 9, when the trial concluded in December 1971, all were acquitted of the charge of inciting a riot, five were cleared of all other charges, while some received suspended sentences for other offences.

Mangrove is part social realist drama, part courtroom drama. The film opens in 1968 and the establishing shots pan across racist slogans on the wall in the wake of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Scenes intersect between the everyday food preparations in the restaurant and discussions of Black Power politics. Thematically, the film concerns itself with institutional racism and bias in the Metropolitan Police and the resultant heavy-handed policing practices. This is brought into particular sharp relief in the scenes when the restaurant is raided and the physical violence officers inflict on restaurant-goers. It highlights the fraught relationship between the police and the local community in Notting Hill. From the establishing shots on, the structure of the film in some ways feels almost like a docu-drama, for example, in the way in which it resolves into courtroom drama. It strives towards accurate representation, for example, in the reprinting of pamphlets, which show the film striving for meticulous historical detail. This is important to consider also in relation to the subjects it depicts and the personalities it centres on. The focus of the film is on questions of justice, on a sense of purpose and on dignity and respect in the face of state harassment. It is here where contemporary resonances with the Black Lives Matter movement echo, but also where the campaigning strategies of a previous era are brought into sharp relief, from organised protest to the decision of Darcus Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe to defend themselves in the trial.

Lovers Rock (2020c), the second film in the anthology, takes its title from the particular style of reggae focused on love, romance, and the erotic in both style, lyrics, and sound. The film is a musical love story set during a blues party and seeks to chart West Indian life in London – the film centres on Martha and her beginning romance with Franklyn. The film very much seeks to replicate this cultural space and sound, and attempts to record this history. In so doing there is again here an attempt to show and document this important part of cultural life in all its meticulous detail, with establishing shots that centre on the set-up of the party, from the preparation of the catering for the evening, to the clearing of the living room and the loading of the sound system. The film works like a small chamber piece, with its setting almost exclusively at the house where the party is taking place, the garden and a few scenes outdoors. The most powerful moment is when on the dance floor, Janet Kay’s song ‘Silly Games’ ends and the dancers continue to sing the song, a scene that is allowed to play out, with the sound focused on shuffling feet and the music and voices and bodies moving to the music in sensual intimacy. The film was the first collaboration between writer Courttia Newland and McQueen. Unlike Mangrove, it is a fictional story set in 1980, and it is very much structured around protagonist Martha’s experience of the party and her encounter with Franklyn and their falling in love with each other. Yet the film is also about community and finding solace in the face of hostility and discrimination. In this respect, in fictional form, the film seeks to recreate and document an experience and a cultural event that forms part of Black British cultural life. It is interesting that along with Mangrove, Lovers Rock was chosen for a cinematic release on the festival circuit – selected for Cannes, it also screened at the New York Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival.

Red, White, and Blue (2020e) centres on Leroy Logan, a forensic scientist who decides, after an attack by two police officers on his father in 1983, to join the Metropolitan Police with the aim to work for positive change from within the force. The film in some ways bears hallmarks of the biopic – Leroy Logan had a 30-year career in the Met police, was instrumental in the founding of the Black Police Association and was especially focused on tackling knife crime and gang violence. Played by John Boyega, the film traces Logan’s initial experiences of training to be a police officer, his subsequent encounters with of institutional racism within the police force and also the hostility he faced from his father and the community, though his aunt staunchly supports his career choice. The film is structured around a father–son relationship, opening with a first encounter of Leroy with the police as a schoolboy as he is collected by his father, and ending with both drinking rum in the kitchen together. Underscored by a Soul and Funk soundtrack (and Leroy’s love for music), the film engages with questions of belonging, Britishness, masculinities, and being a role model or posterboy. In that sense, it seeks to confront Leroy’s idealism and his ambition to bring change to the Met police ‘from the inside out’, yet being faced with the realities of policing and the hostile structures within the police that puncture this idealism. It is interesting to see here Leroy’s friendship with Asif, a British South Asian police officer. They bond over their similar experiences of racism – while Asif decides to quit, Leroy perseveres. Red, White, and Blue works as an interesting companion piece to Mangrove in how both films consider the role of the police, and the commentary they make on community liaising and violent policing. The film works with raw emotionality through the central performance of John Boyega as Leroy Logan charts his path to navigate the complexities of his own position as a policeman and whether his ambition to change the organisation from the inside is naïve and the extent to which he is becoming complicit. This carries forward into the final two films in the anthology.

Alex Wheatle (2020a) is the penultimate film in the anthology. Focused on the award-winning writer’s life, the film narrates in flashback Wheatle’s childhood, spent in a children’s home in care. It begins with his arrival in prison, convicted in the wake of the Brixton uprising. In conversation with his cell mate, he reveals his experiences of growing up, and of his life in Brixton, initially under the tutelage of Danny. He witnesses first-hand the heavy-handed tactics of the police, but also finds his own ability to fit in challenged. The film marks a shift in location from the previous three to south London and Brixton. Upon his arrival in prison, Alex reflects in flashback upon his experiences of systemic violence and his social awakening in Brixton as he forges his own new path.

The film is part biography, part story of initiation. The fact that it is told in flashback allows for a differently reflective commentary and centres wider questions of identity and belonging. A central moment in the film is the New Cross fire, a racially motivated arson attack on 18 January 1981, which led to widespread outrage and the Black People’s Day of Action and was one of the events that led to the Brixton uprising. McQueen chooses to bring the event into the film through a montage of photographs, detailing the aftermath of the fire, the grief experienced, the demonstrations and actions that followed, as well as the violent response of the police, arresting many of the protestors. This montage of still photographs documenting the event is accompanied by a voice-over reading of an abridged version of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem ‘New Craas Massakah’ (2006), which serves as a powerful way of documenting these important events. McQueen goes on to explore the New Cross fire, Black People’s Day of Action and Brixton Uprising in much greater detail across three episodes in the documentary, Uprising (2021a, 2021b, 2021c), which he directed and co-produced for the BBC.

The last film in the anthology, Education (2020b), focuses on Kingsley, a schoolboy who dreams of being an astronaut, but is failed by the education system. The film brings into sharp focus the way in which young black children were discriminated against within the education system, often designated as less intelligent, with IQ tests used to segregate children. This led to many children being placed in special need schools, scuppering their chances of educational success. The focus on Kingsley and the process of how he becomes labelled as disruptive because of his disturbance of a music class and stupid because of his difficulty with reading occupies the first sections of the film. McQueen allows scenes to play out here, on the one hand centring on Kingsley’s domestic relationship with his mother and sister, on the other with his school friends and his experience at his new school. McQueen registers Kingsley’s own inner turmoil. In one scene, we see him in the bath submerging himself in water; in another, he is unable to confront his former school friends and lies down on the floor of his school bus until they have left. It shows Kingsley trapped and disillusioned. The way in which McQueen allows the camera to linger on Kingsley’s face, often showing him in profile or through medium close-ups establishes empathy, but also a real sense of the turmoil he experiences. The film focuses on the denial of educational opportunity and the consequences this entails for young children like Kingsley or his friend Nina and the racism they experience. When the psychologist Hazel enters the unsupervised classroom, Nina reveals in their exchange that she does not want to be black, to which Hazel responds that black is beautiful and that she is a proud black woman.

The film works productively with the cross-generational conflicts on one hand, and on the other tackles key questions around how to confront the structural racism of the education system. The latter part of the film considers this by focusing on the way in which educational campaigners and parents protested against this policy and ends with scenes of a supplementary Saturday school that centres knowledge to empower children and ends on Kingsley’s reading attempts, at home with his mother and sister, before McQueen returns us to the opening images of outer space with which the film began. It gestures towards the notion that Kingsley’s dreams remain alive and focuses on the possibilities of change. It is interesting to note that this final film is followed five months later with a documentary, Subnormal: A Very British Scandal, broadcast in May 2021 on BBC One, which was executive produced by McQueen.

Throughout his career, McQueen has brought important subjects into representation through his work that straddle different media and production modalities. Indeed, as Richard Martin has pointed, out, ‘McQueen’s trajectory might tell us something about the different production contexts that have shaped British cinema […]. McQueen moved into feature filmmaking working with Film4, with the UK Film Council and then within the Hollywood system’ (2021, 81). The ‘Small Axe’ anthology further expands this to the medium of television. What Richard Martin, Clive Nwonka, Ozlem Koksal, and Ashley Clark consider so productively in their conversation ‘Understanding Steve McQueen’ (2021) is the complexity in placing Steve McQueen especially in relation to mainstream film production and television.

Clark compares McQueen’s career trajectory with that of Isaac Julien’s, who shifted from feature film work into the gallery space. He sees McQueen’s as a reversal of this and considers McQueen in terms of form ‘a fairly conservative filmmaker’ (2021, 82). This assessment requires perhaps some further nuancing in relation to McQueen’s position in relation to ideas of the mainstream. Here, Clive Nwonka offers productive challenges to the notion of the mainstream as it relates to the context of filmmaking and proposes to think about the mainstream as not something occupied by everyone but to consider instead that ‘there are degrees to the mainstream’ – whilst McQueen is ‘mainstream in terms of acclaim [… and] presence in the film scene […] his film practice in terms of aesthetics is completely non-mainstream in many ways’ (2021, 82). A wider question emerging from this in-conversation relates to McQueen’s practice and how one might read it through the continuities between his gallery work and his feature films or the extent to which one might want to focus attention on the distinctions. It is perhaps important to note that before ‘Small Axe’, Steve McQueen did not directly centre and address the Black British experience in his work.

‘Small Axe’ marks an intervention that repositions McQueen in relation to debates on citizenship, equality, and inclusion focused on human dignity. In this respect, McQueen’s choice of film for television, rather than theatrically released feature film is important to consider, not least as he chose as platform Britain’s main public service broadcaster, the BBC, which scheduled the film anthology in the primetime Sunday evening drama slot on its main channel, BBC One. The aim was ‘to help bring’, according to Charlotte Moore, BBC Director of Content, ‘these stories to as big an audience as possible’ (J. S., J 2020). Over the period of research, writing, and production of the films since McQueen embarked on this project, the political landscape has significantly changed, as has the media landscape especially through streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Britbox and the BBC’s iPlayer. This also brings to the fore how McQueen’s work circulates nationally and transnationally, accessible through multiple streaming platforms beyond linear television scheduling.

As highlighted, much debate has centred on where to situate McQueen and his work across different forms of artistic expression and how they relate to access to the mainstream. And one might argue that the ‘Small Axe’ anthology opens up further pathways to explore his place in the wider contexts of Black British film-making, but also in relation to long-standing debates about representation and its burdens, as Mercer has argued (1990). Engaging with Paul Gilroy’s explorations of ‘populist modernism’ as a way of registering the intersections of race, culture, and ethnicity in discussions of the cultural and political importance of black cultural production in Britain, Mercer seeks to expand this concept to a consideration of ‘the institutional and historical context of the conditions that determine black cultural practices in the visual arts’ (63). These points are important to consider in relation to the modalities of representation at work in the anthology. They allow for a further assessment of the anthology’s political and cultural significance to Britain, especially in relation to its post-colonial moment. In that respect, the anthology makes key interventions into the discourse of the ‘re-making’ of British national identity and the process of imagining, or re-imagining community (63). This remains a pressing concern in contemporary British contexts, especially in relation to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment it brought with it. Yet it also gestures to a much longer historical trajectory into the 1950s and Britain’s difficulty in redefining itself in the aftermath of the Second World War, which Paul Gilroy has described in After Empire (2004) as ‘postimperial melancholia’ (98).

The arguments, then, centre on the way in which notions of Britishness are defined, fractured and opened up, and how this is achieved through representational modalities of film for television. Mercer’s argument around the ‘burden of representation’ needs to be posed in terms of ‘structure and agency’ – ‘an effect of the hierarchy of access to the institutional spaces of cultural production’ (65). What happens in these instances is that a work of art is often seen as ‘representative’ or speaking for a community. These considerations play an important role in the way in which the ‘Small Axe’ anthology is centred within BBC publicity on the one hand but also how the role of McQueen’s own position in the public sphere is viewed. As Ashley Clark points out, there are few Black British filmmakers who have a long career trajectory that is focused on social realist film-making that captures the experience of the community. He states:

‘I can’t help feel a slight ruefulness at the lack of a Black Ken Loach or Stephen Frears […] that kind of long career arc which is often connected with social realism. Horace Ové has two theatrically released features to his name […] there’s a huge gap in the last 40 years of Black British filmmaking with no real core of sustained work by a single filmmaker, where we can discern their aesthetic or where their obsessions have been able to come to fruition’ (Martin et. al. 2021, 83).

In some way perhaps ‘Small Axe’ and the documentaries that McQueen produced on Black British life address Clark’s points. However, Clark also implies here the exclusionary funding model in the UK film industry that makes it much more difficult to sustain such a career trajectory (see Nwonka 2020).

A further important question to which the ‘Small Axe’ anthology responds relates to wider questions of representation and the way in which these engage issues of identity and subject formation. Stuart Hall has explored these concerns in his essay, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’ (1989). Hall points here to the question of enunciation: ‘Who is this emergent, new subject of cinema? From where does it speak?’ (68) These issues are important in relation to the way in which filmmakers approach the representation of individual experience, how such individual experiences intersect with those of a collective experience, and how this is represented in film. In that respect, Hall argues, ‘who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never exactly in the same place’ (68). He proposes an alternative configuration, arguing that ‘instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a “production”, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (68). Hall centres here the importance of an awareness of the position from which one speaks – ‘from a particular place and time, from a history and culture which is specific’ (68). This is important in relation to the ‘Small Axe’ anthology in relation to its moment of production and subsequent release. Of course, these films were commissioned far ahead of time, but McQueen, very specifically situates these in the press releases in relation to the contemporary moment of 2020. The scheduling of ‘Small Axe’ followed in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in July 2020 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement – in this respect the release of the films responded to a particular socio-cultural moment. That said, the ‘Small Axe’ anthology was in the planning for over a decade, highlighting that McQueen researched and worked on this project concurrently with his feature film work. As mentioned, the films also connect with documentary work, such as Uprising (2021), which focused on the New Cross fire, Black People Day of Action and Brixton Uprising of 1981, which McQueen directed; further linked documentaries where McQueen acted as executive producer include Subnormal: A Very British Scandal (2021).

As stated in the online media press release (3 June 2020), two of the five films – Mangrove and Lovers Rock – were co-produced with BBC Films at feature length, so that they could be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of the announcement, McQueen states: ‘I dedicate these films to George Floyd and all the other black people that have been murdered, seen or unseen, because of who they are, in the US, UK, and elsewhere. “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” Black Lives Matter’ (J. S., 2020). This establishes these films as part of wider continuum of black activism that transcends regional and national boundaries highlighting the relevance of these films to the contemporary moment in Britain and transnationally.

As outlined above, an important aspect of McQueen’s works is the deep explorations of the different ways of seeing the world and opening up new perspectives by exploding received conventions of representation. McQueen’s career trajectory has led to him being one of the most recognised Black British film directors. A particular anchoring point for this article has been a consideration of his collaborations with the public service broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). At this juncture, it is useful to further explore McQueen’s position of the artist as public intellectual and how he is framed. This opens up wider questions how the anthology addresses issues of public memory, memorialisation, and cultural amnesia of key events that have shaped the Black British experience, and how these issues are addressed in the wider public sphere by public bodies, the intellectual, as well as broadcast media. This further complicates the position in national discourse of the artist and filmmaker as activist and public intellectual. It returns us to a key question that Adriano José Habed and Sandra Ponzanesi pose in their introduction to Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: ‘Are people who have a public role and perform intellectual labor by definition public intellectuals? How is this activity held in regard by society, both in the past and at present, across different cultures and settings?’ (2018, xxxv) What is clear is that through the series of collaborations McQueen as director and executive producer has made important contributions as to how the experience of black Britons is engaged in as part of a wider consideration of British history. This then contributes in productive ways to the way in which power dynamics need to be tracked in the production of history.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, ‘History, as social process involves peoples in three distinct capacities’ as ‘agents’, ‘actors’ and ‘subjects’ (1995, 22; original italics). To trace power in historical production, Trouillot proposes an enlarged number of actors, beyond the professional historian who participate in the production of history, from ‘field laborers who augment, deflect, or reorganize the work of the professionals as politicians, students, fiction writers, filmmakers, and participating members of the public’ (1995, 25). Trouillot points here to the fluidity between ‘history as social process and history as knowledge’ (1995, 26). Trouillot’s concern revolve around silences and their occurrence in the process of archive making, narrativization and evaluation of history, which leads him to conclude that ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly’ (1995, 27). In these concerns, we can clearly see echoes in McQueen’s approaches in the ‘Small Axe’ anthology. It is here where further intersections between his work as filmmaker and the wider networks of critical and public intellectual evaluation and debate can be discerned, not least that of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, to which McQueen’s work relates and on which it draws. As such, these films and documentaries work as an amplification and spotlighting of work that seeks to shift public perception. This too is of course the work of the public intellectual, but this conceptualisation allows for certain slippages as well that decentre the public intellectual as celebrity figure, or as author and auteur, but instead considers collective action, and voice by centring and showcasing the brutalising experiences of black communities in the UK in the ‘Small Axe’ anthology. They point to injustices, inequities, and racism as embedded in state institutions. Yet the films also further consider the complexities of history, memory, and memorialisation of the Black British experience in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. They consider forms of activism in the face of a hostile state, the building of communities, and reveal the endemic discrimination in state institutions from the police to the judiciary to education systems, thus exposing important discursive questions in the 1970s/80s contexts of so-called race relations that echo today.

Steve McQueen’s work relating to Small Axe was accompanied by a series of documentaries with which he was involved either as executive producer – Black Power: A British Story of Resistance (2021) and Subnormal (2021), or as director – Uprising (2021a, 2021b, 2021c). The BBC very much sought to ensure that the wider educational importance of these films remained firmly in view, adding short entries on the events covered in the ‘Small Axe’ films to their school education website, ‘Bitesize’ as part of the learn and revise section (2020). These entries covered Frank Crichlow, the owner of the Mangrove restaurant, Blues Parties, and Lover’s Rock records, police officer Leroy Logan, writer Alex Wheatle, and Saturday schools. It is important to view this programming as a way of facilitating further interconnected conversations as part of a networking of dialogues that connect the spheres of culture, politics, and wider institutions – it is here especially where the role of the BBC as public service broadcaster requires perhaps further scrutiny in its function in shaping these conversations and bringing to wider audience constituencies the experiences, histories, and legacies of Black Britishness. It is then perhaps also necessary to think through further what the place of the ‘Small Axe’ anthology films, made for television, is in regard to the wider representation of black experiences in television as they relate to conceptualisations of the mainstream (see Stadtler 2020). Kobena Mercer in his introduction to Black Images in British Television (1989) talks about the complex modalities of representation and attempts in the 1980s to ‘diversify the images on offer’ (1). Indeed, one might argue that the ‘Small Axe’ films very much build on this legacy.

In conclusion, the ‘Small Axe’ anthology of films seeks to open up aspects of British history that are not often given space within mainstream cultural production. In that sense, these films show a concern with recording, documentation, and seeking to represent with accuracy through meticulous research the essence of this lived experience and to crucially consider it as part of a wider, and central, aspect of British history. By centring these stories on individual experiences, McQueen manages to highlight exponentially the impact of racism and discrimination and how they filter into policy decisions, fuelled by prejudices of the media coverage of the time, in which the BBC was also complicit. The stories in ‘Small Axe’ expose state structures and offer a thorough examination of race relations and racism in British society from the 1960s into the 70s and 80s. They pose questions about the nation, how it conceives of itself, and how it accommodates its transnational citizens who migrated from the ‘Commonwealth’ to what was discursively presented as the ‘mother country’. These films powerfully point to the complex questions of identity formation, home and belonging through the prism of the past. They can be viewed in didactic terms, as an argument about historical discourse, or read in biographical terms – to quote one of the characters in the film Alex Wheatle, ‘if you don’t know your past then you won’t know your future’ (0:59:01). On a larger level, they also need to be viewed through a wider prism of consciousness- and awareness-raising among the mainstream viewership of BBC One.

What is perhaps most interesting is to see how McQueen uses these films as starting points for further investigations of concerns around educational policies, policing, and the judicial system, to further bring into sharp relief the systemic discrimination and inequalities Britain’s black communities are facing. Indeed, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies examined many of the issues McQueen’s films are concerned with in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982). The book exposed the intersections of race and class and exposed the reliance of the state on ingrained racist structures that shaped conceptualisations of culture, nation and class. The films are designed to engage in what Paul Gilroy has described in the context of the Black Atlantic as an ‘attempt to figure a deterritorialised, multiplex and anti-national basis for the affinity or “identity of passions” between diverse black populations’ (Gilroy 1996, 18). One might then want to complicate further the question of memory and public consciousness especially as it needs to transcend narrow articulations of ideas of nationhood as central to conceptualisations of belonging, and here history and the exclusions and silences within historical discourse play an important role.

As the historian Raphael Samuel in his seminal work Theatres of Memory has pointed out, ‘History is an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing, sometimes under the influence of developments in adjacent fields of thought, sometimes […] as a result of politics’ (2012, 430). Importantly, in terms of their audience address they also hold up a mirror to a country, they challenge received ideological positions, and show that the black experience of the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s is central to British history. Therefore, it is important to retain it in view to better understand the struggles and achievements, campaigns and activism for dignity and respect to help build better futures. In this respect, the ‘Small Axe’ anthology holds up a mirror to contemporary society as we witness the rise of authoritarianism, and exclusionary and divisive forms of ethno-nationalisms that are fuelled by racism, highlighting these not as new phenomena, but part of a longer continuum.

It is in these interstices and societal fissures that McQueen intervenes in a plea for justice, dignity, solidarity, and respect on the one hand, which resonate in our contemporary moment, and on the other to actively highlight that the Black British experience is an integral part of British history that needs to be acknowledged and taught as such to further contemporary activism and debate about home, belonging, and citizenship. But what is also significant to reflect on is the films’ capabilities of offering a more variegated representation of the Black British experience, one that finds itself linked to attempts to unbind ‘the burden of representation’ towards more nuanced explorations of the sites of cultural and political contestation around the production of subjectivities and identities. It is into these intellectual conversations that McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ anthology so keenly intervenes.

Short bio

Florian Stadtler is Lecturer in Literature and Migration in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on Salman Rushdie, Indian Cinemas, South Asian Writing in English, and Black and Asian British film, history and literature. He is currently completing a major edited collection for Cambridge University Press, Salman Rushdie in Context. He was Reviews Editor of Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing from 2010 to 2022 and is now a trustee.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).