John Akomfrah

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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 Harveys John Akomfrah is the first comprehensive analytic engagement with these films, offering sustained close engagement with the artists core thematic preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies. His analysis negotiates the contextual and theoretical layers of Akomfrahs rich and complex films, from the intermedial diaspora aesthetics of Handsworth Songs (1986) to the intersectional spatial ecopolitics of Purple (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.

Reviews

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. -- Glyn Davis, University of St Andrews, UK
This is a timely and important book that traces the concerns and contexts of Akomfrahs oeuvre from the early years of Black Audio Film Collective through to the Four Nocturnes commissioned for the the inaugural Ghana Freedom pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Through close readings and drawing from a wide range of sources this book explains Akomfrahs central role as a commanding film maker of his generation in Britain. Harveys own theoretical fluency deciphers and explores Akomfrahs preoccupations with iconicity, gesture, memory and montage, siting him finally as a neo expressionist for our epoch. -- Rachel Garfield, The Royal College of Art, London, UK

Author Bio

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 Rancire and the Politics of Art Cinema (2018).