Unaccented beat: positional politics and the enigma of visibility in The Stuart Hall Project

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his essay film, The Stuart Hall Project, Akomfrah resumes his exploration of the multi-layered screen approach to political aesthetics, offering a complex portrait of his subject’s abiding concern with social inequality, tracking its manifestations in the ‘conjugated cultural realities’ of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism down to its vanishing point in the ‘neo-liberal problem space’ of present-day Britain. Paying close attention to the use of associative editing, Vertovian color montage, and contrapuntal rhythmicity, this paper highlights the film’s critical take on the coalescence of multicultural drift, the slow moving glacier of feminism, and the paradigm of the diaspora into three-layered screens through which positional politics is redefined within the framework of Présence Africaine and the larger trajectory of contemporary African and diasporan artists, intellectuals, and activists.