Articles by Ashvin Kini

Ashvin R. Kini (he/him) is assistant professor of English at Florida Atlantic University.

Political Blackness, British Cinema, and the Queer Politics of Memory

Black and white still image from the The Passion of Remembrance. Courtesy of Women Make Movies.
By Ashvin Kini

This essay queries “political Blackness” as a coalitional antiracist politics in England in the 1970s and 1980s. Contemporary debates on the relevance of political Blackness in contemporary British race politics often forget significant critiques of the concept articulated by feminist and queer scholars, activists and cultural producers. Through close readings of Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood’s The Passion of Remembrance and Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, this essay examines cinematic engagements with political Blackness by foregrounding the gender and sexual fault lines through which queers and feminists articulated relational solidarities attentive to difference.