‘De Margin and De Centre’: Repositioning Race and Ethnicity in Diasporic European Cinema

Abstract

In 1988, Isaac Julien, a black British artist and filmmaker, and Kobena Mercer, an art historian and critic who has widely written on black British art and culture, wrote the introduction to ‘The Last Special Issue on Race’, published in the journal Screen. It was entitled ‘De Margin and De Centre’ and has inspired the title of this chapter and many of the arguments I shall develop. Julien and Mercer argue that the 1980s represent a significant juncture in the cinematic representation of ‘cultural difference, identity and otherness — in a word, ethnicity’ (1988: 2), which emerged as a key issue of contestation and public debate at the time. White and black-authored films at the opposite end of the spectrum of artistic practices, including the big budget film The Colour Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) and artisanal productions such as Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986) and The Passion of Remembrance (Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986) offer competing versions of black experience and memory. With ‘The Last Special Issue on Race’ Julien and Mercer seek to contribute to the ‘break-up and deconstruction of structures that determine what is regarded as culturally central and what is regarded as culturally marginal’ (1988: 2). According to their programmatic vision, in years to come, cultural discourses and practices on race and ethnicity would no longer be assigned a special issue because that in itself is indicative of their marginalisation.