Black Boys

Adopting a unique, contextual approach to film, drawing linkages between the political economy, the social and the aesthetic, Clive Nwonka provides a rich and unashamedly complex analysis of Black urban film, a genre that is at best, not taken seriously, and at worst, denigrated and dismissed. Nwonka has produced the most important book on Black British visual culture since Kobena Mercer’s Welcome to the Jungle (1994). * Anamik Saha, Professor of Race and Media, University of Leeds, UK *
Black Boys is a brilliant ensemble of screen cultures and the scripting of Black youth, masculinity and class. Clive Nwonka hones an intellectual and inhabited understanding of the vitality and racial abrasions that shape Black urban identity in Britain. Attuned, detailed and acute, this remarkable book reveals the reverberations across the cinematic and street life of ‘race’, politics and place. * Suzanne Hall, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics & Political Science, UK *
A brilliantly textured account that weaves the politics of race into the story of black cultural production. Its rejection of the singular flatness of black urban lives captured in film encapsulates a deft critique of the harmful ideological, material, cultural and aesthetic features of film production. Thoughtfully and convincingly argued, violence by the state and creative industries is centre-framed in Nwonka’s Black Boys. * Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK *
Black Boys should be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in British film and media, and Black British culture more broadly. Stretching across and collapsing the boundaries between disciplines, this is a book of great substance, sophistication and insight, which offers a way of seeing Black masculinity and urban identity which is both meticulous in its analysis and revelatory in its conclusions. * David Forrest, Professor in Film and Television Studies, University of Sheffield, UK *
Black Boys is a precious and unique assessment of the vital, everchanging living archive of Black British film and TV. Through Nwonka's detailed historical alignments and incisive theoretical poetry we come to view these texts less as a window onto the realities of UK Black urbanism but rather as a way of questioning their version of that reality. What is included in these film spectacles of violence and bodily and social injury and also what remains absent and out of frame? Black Boys helps us find an answer to these questions and gauge how close these texts are to an adequate portrayal of Black lives on screen. * Les Back, Professor of Sociology, University of Glasgow, UK *
Black Boys is complex because it needs to be. It offers a nuanced analytical lens through which we can view historic and contemporary representations of Black life on screen. Inherently interdisciplinary in scope, Nwonka draws on cultural studies, sociology, film studies, political science, Black Studies and social theory to take the reader beyond the familiar terrain of spectacular violence and criminality. It provides a visual language that speaks to Black identities in film and television. Digging deep into ‘the urban’ as a sensibility and a visual identity, Nwonka explores the racialised characteristics of Black boys and men on screen, raising important questions along the way on the cultural politics of the production and dissemination of Black urban texts. * Joy White, Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences, University of Bedfordshire, UK *