Redemption Song

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-61
Author(s):  
James S. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Black Masculinity ◽  
British History ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Sexual Norms ◽  
Black British ◽  
Constant Tension ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Poetic License ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Striking Contrast

This article explores how Steve McQueen’s acclaimed 2020 pentalogy Small Axe (BBC) appears paradoxically to swerve away from Black British history in the very act of retrieving it. By examining key moments in Mangrove, Red, White and Blue, and Alex Wheatley, it argues that the constant tension between a push toward history and the pull of the aesthetic is the result of McQueen’s reformulation of “racial uplift” aesthetics that privileges exceptional acts over collective experience. Yet in striking contrast to his poetic license with history, McQueen presents Black masculinity and male self-expression within standard social and sexual norms. There are, however, more experimental, stylized moments in Small Axe where the historical and the aesthetic come together, notably in the highly physical dancing sequences of Lovers Rock. While not without limitations, such scenes reveal fresh, liberatory forms of Black space and time, and forge transformative and redemptive moments of Black reality.

scholarly journals “He Was Shot because America Will Not Give Up on Racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Civil Rights Movement in British Schools

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MEGAN HUNT ◽  
BENJAMIN HOUSTON ◽  
BRIAN WARD ◽  
NICK MEGORAN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
British History ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black British ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Martin Luther King

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

Blood, Fire, and Interiority in Horace Ové’s Pressure

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (47) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Yasmine Espert
Keyword(s):  
Black Community ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black British ◽  
Public Protest ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Black Britain

Pressure, the first feature film by a black British director, was the center of praise and critique at the time of its release. Completed in 1974, it narrates a coming-of-age story about a young man who discovers the complexity of Black Power activism in London. This article investigates how the Trinidad-born director Horace Ové pictures activists and Caribbean migrants of the Windrush generation throughout the film. Close analyses reveal that Ové relied on his training as a documentarian to capture what he perceived to be an authentic, rather than celebratory, version of London’s black community. His deliberate choice to steer from an “uplift” aesthetic ignited a debate that continues to the present day. I argue that Ové’s observational style in the film attempts to picture the public and the inner lives of black Britain. Ultimately, it shows that the call for equity and liberation is more than a matter of public protest dressed in the aesthetic of blaxploitation. My argument draws on scholarship by Kevin Quashie and Elizabeth Alexander to reveal the potential of the interior and the imagination in representations of Black Power.

Creating a Quilt: An Aesthetic Expression of Caring for Nursing Students

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Charlotte D. Barry,
Keyword(s):  
Nursing Students ◽  
Nursing Practice ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Caring Relationship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

An assignment for beginning nursing students provides the milieu for reflection on a nursing situation, appreciation of a caring relationship between the nurse and nursed, and expression of the caring through an aesthetic project. Each student represented a unique situation on a square, and the squares were sewn together to form a quilt. The quilt is apprehended as a whole but closer scrutiny reveals squares of many colors that have been sewn together. The distinct squares represent the work of students and teachers on a journey of understanding. Each of the squares reveals a unique story of caring from nursing practice. The aesthetic project provides the opportunity for the individual and collective experience of caring as the students share their stories of caring with each other and the larger community of nurses.

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