Unbossed and Unbound: How can critical proximity transfigure British colonial moving images?

This research engages the Colonial Film Unit (CFU), and its history as the propaganda arm of the British Empire, to expose how the visioning technology of cinema and the archivisation of the CFU’s materials fuel the transformation of a racist colonial imaginary to fixed truths of the colonial black subject. I argue that this imaginary exists within the epistemological formation referred to as Colonial Thought. To combat this several theoretical strategies have emerged in archival studies such as reading against the grain, auto ethnography or critical fabulation, all of which have influenced moving image practices. However there remain ethical questions, in terms of whether these methodologies sufficiently exist outside of the very knowledge systems that create totalizing and racist understandings of blackness. This research develops and deploys critical proximity; a methodology that embraces illegitimate forms, outside the bounds of Colonial Thought, to transfigure colonial moving images and produce audiovisual works that challenge hegemonic ways of knowing.