Black, British and Feminist: The History and Legacy of Ceddo, Sankofa and the Black Audio Film Collective

This thesis examines the role and representation of women in Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, Sankofa Film and Video Collective and the Black Audio Film Collective. Emerging in the 1980s, the Black Workshops sought to counter conventional depictions of ‘Blackness’ through an experimental filmmaking practice. Until recently, however, the Workshops have been relatively neglected in studies of British cinema, with attention primarily focused on their male figures, particularly Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah. As a result, the crucial roles that the Workshops’ women members played in shaping the groups’ collaborative approaches and creative outputs have been largely overlooked.

Through a combination of archival research, interviews and textual analysis, the first part of the thesis situates the Workshops within a Black women-centric framework which not only contextualises the collectives’ feminist concerns but also demonstrates how the Workshops’ productions are underpinned by a broad network of women artists, thinkers and activists who operated both within and beyond the collectives’ official groupings. The second part of the thesis provides close textual analyses of a selection of the Workshops’ films. This involves an examination of the social dynamics and historical conditions that framed the production of the groups’ works as well an application of the Workshops’ (co)-authorial intentions. In this way, the breadth of the Workshops’ feminist oeuvre is highlighted while thematic links between the groups’ formal approaches and aesthetic concerns are concurrently drawn. Uniting several lines of inquiry pursued throughout the thesis, the final chapter focuses on how public institutions and community organisations have both championed and impeded the Workshops’ feminist legacies. The thesis concludes by challenging the critical tendencies that obscure feminist interpretations of the Workshops’ filmmaking and suggesting pertinent lines of inquiry that remain ripe for further investigation.