Cultural discourses and practices of institutionalised diversity in the UK film sector: ‘Just get something black made’

Abstract

Diversity' is an evolving dimension of discursive debates within publicly funded parts of the UK media. This article considers how representations of racial diversity in cinema were articulated in a particular moment in recent history. It traces the relationship between the broader New Labour neoliberal agenda of the late 1990s and the UK Film Council's (UKFC) New Cinema Fund, the key funding mechanism for supporting black British cinema at the time. The authors suggest that the New Cinema Fund's 'institutional diversity' agenda represented a symbolic effort by both the UKFC and UK public service broadcasters to redevelop black British film vis-a-vis a plethora of cultural imperatives oriented around the notion of 'social inclusion'. The nature of this intervention, it is argued, was strongly influenced by the 1999 Macpherson Report, which identified 'institutional racism' within the fabric of the UK's organisations. The article examines how such an 'institutional diversity' agenda emerged within the production context of a BBC Film/ UKFC production, Bullet Boy (2005), thus generating a rearticulated black British cinema that was deeply imbricated in the highly politicised contexts outlined.

Funky Days Are (Not) Back Again: Cool Britannia and the Rise and Fall of British South Asian Cultural Production

“…While one could argue that the new brown cultural producers themselves contributed to this normalisation of multiculture with the symbolic goods they were producing that were articulating new multi-culturally inclusive (rather than exclusively White) British ethnicities, I would also argue that the recognition/legitimation of brown cultural production was helped by a more enlightened attitude towards the very fact of Britain's own multiculture 'Cool Britannia' not only evoked a cosmopolitan outlook (though this was quickly replaced by a whitewashed version of British cultural history as Britpop came to the fore) but also emphasised the centrality of creativity -and the creative industries -within this new, modern Britain. The renaming of the 'Department of National Heritage' as the 'Department of Culture, Media and Sport' (DCMS) as Labour came to power was about aligning the party with the knowledge economy, but again, also reflected New Labour attempts to create Britain as a more cosmopolitan, youthful nation (Nwonka and Malik 2018). Much has been written about creative industries policy as a response to industrial decline, reframing creativity in terms of economic growth and urban regeneration (Oakley, 2004(Oakley, 2006.…”

“…Nonetheless, the main purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how the practices of British Asian cultural producers have been shaped by the political-economic and socialcultural shifts that the UK has gone through since the New Labour government. In doing so I situate this work within the growing body of race and cultural production research (Malik 2008, Hesmondhalgh and Saha 2013, Nwonka 2015, Malik and Nwonka 2018, Saha 2018 that focuses on the making of representations of race, and how inequalities in the cultural industries shape the way that minorities are portrayed in the media. It also adds to the literature on creative industries policy in the UK, and the extent to which it is neoliberal in character (Oakley 2004, Newsinger 2012, Hesmondhalgh et at 2015.…”

And … action? Gender, knowledge and inequalities in the UK screen industries

“…Broadcasters and sector organizations such as the British Film Institute (BFI), Creative Skillset, Women in Film and Television, Directors UK or the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union (BECTU) have for some time engaged in pro‐diversity policy and initiatives and interventions aimed especially at women, ethnic minorities and disabled people. Prominent examples are the commitment in the BFI Diversity Standards to encourage increased diversity in National Lottery‐funded films or Channel 4's 360° Diversity Charter which includes guidelines for considering workforce diversity in commissioning decisions (for a critique of diversity schemes such as these, see Nwonka & Malik, ). Gender inequalities in screen work are part of this established broader diversity agenda, but also distinctly visible within it.…”

“…Comprising film, TV, animation, video games and special effects production (VFX), the screen sector constitutes a major share of the UK's creative industries and has been at the forefront of the creative industries policy agenda (Newsinger, 2012 Nwonka & Malik, 2018). Gender inequalities in screen work are part of this established broader diversity agenda, but also distinctly visible within it.…”

Inequality talk: How discourses by senior men reinforce exclusions from creative occupations

“…Campbell et al, 2018) or theorisations of creativity (Campbell, 2018;Osborne, 2003), there has been a recent and extensive focus on inequalities in the sector. There has been extensive work on the demographics of CCI occupations, demonstrating exclusions and underrepresentation according to class Oakley et al, 2017), gender (Conor et al, 2015) and race (Nwonka and Malik, 2018;Saha, 2018). Much of this work has sought to account for the unbalanced workforce of cultural and creative occupations, highlighting the norms of maleness, the expectation of excessive working hours, the hidden barriers associated with middle-class occupational cultures, along with examples of hostility or outright discrimination against those who do not fit a white, male, middle-class origin 'somatic norm' (Bull, 2019;Childress, 2017;De Benedictis et al, 2017;Gerber, 2017;Hesmondhalgh, 2018;Randle et al, 2015;Saha, 2018;Scharff, 2017).…”