John Akomfrah [Paperback]

The films of John Akomfrah represent one of the most significant bodies of artistic production in the post-war era in Britain, yet little attempt has been made to analyse the consistencies and divergences across them.

James Harvey'sJohn Akomfrahis the first comprehensive analytic engagement with these films, offering sustained close engagement with the artist's core thematic preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies. His analysis negotiates the contextual and theoretical layers of Akomfrah's rich and complex films, from the intermedial diaspora aesthetics ofHandsworth Songs(1986) to the intersectional spatial ecopolitics ofPurple(2017).

Positioning Akomfrah in the burgeoning black British arts and cultural scene of the 1980s as a member of Black Audio Film Collective, Harvey traces the evolution of a critical relationship with the postcolonial archive in his early films, through analysis of documentaries made for television in the 1990s and up to more recent film installations in museums and galleries.

James Harvey is Lecturer in film studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. An academic and curator, he is author ofNationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema(2018) andJacques Ranci?re and the Politics of Art Cinema(2018).

James Harvey's dextrous, perceptive account of John Akomfrah's extraordinary contributions to cinema is a rich and invaluable work of scholarship. Spanning the full breadth of Akomfrah's career to date - from ground-breaking works with the Black Audio Film Collective to more recent gallery installation pieces - Harvey adopts a productive thematic approach, identifying formal and political links between individual works, and between Akomfrah and a variety of other artists, filmmakers and thinkers. Throughout, Harvey repeatedly returns to Akomfrah's deployment of archive materials and of montage techniques, pinpointing the manifold ways in which Akomfrah has innovated with blSê