John Akomfrah

James Harvey is Lecturer in film studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. An academic and curator, he is author of Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema (2018) and Jacques Rancière 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 both. This highly readable book is a significant contribution to the study of Black British cinema, experimental and avant-garde film, and the politics of the diaspora.

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction: Positioning John Akomfrah1.The Ghosts of Other Stories: Thatcherism and Postcolonial Britain2.Black Stars: From Racial Iconicity to Black Atlantic Collectivity3.Memory-images: Catharsis, Embodiment and the Aesthetics of Remembrance4.Why They Come: Migration Films in the Age of ‘Refugee Crisis’5.Changing Site, Changing Sight: The Spatial Turn6.Water, Earth, Elephants: The Human Destruction Trilogy as Political Ecology7.‘Staking Claims on the Real’: An Interview with John AkomfrahNotesBibliographyIndex