Blood, Fire, and Interiority in Horace Ové’s Pressure

Pressure, the first feature film by a black British director, was the center of praise and critique at the time of its release. Completed in 1974, it narrates a coming-of-age story about a young man who discovers the complexity of Black Power activism in London. This article investigates how the Trinidad-born director Horace Ové pictures activists and Caribbean migrants of the Windrush generation throughout the film. Close analyses reveal that Ové relied on his training as a documentarian to capture what he perceived to be an authentic, rather than celebratory, version of London’s black community. His deliberate choice to steer from an “uplift” aesthetic ignited a debate that continues to the present day. I argue that Ové’s observational style in the film attempts to picture the public and the inner lives of black Britain. Ultimately, it shows that the call for equity and liberation is more than a matter of public protest dressed in the aesthetic of blaxploitation. My argument draws on scholarship by Kevin Quashie and Elizabeth Alexander to reveal the potential of the interior and the imagination in representations of Black Power.

Writing Black Scotland

Writing Black Scotland: Race, Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain examines Blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing, bringing together two established contemporary literary-critical fields – Black British and Scottish literature – with significant implications for both. The book focuses on key literary works from the 1970s to the early 2000s, which emerge from and shape a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment: a new British state politics of race centred on multiculturalism, the changing status of the Union, and the expanding racial diversity of Scotland itself. The book suggests that the larger world context of Black politics shaped the priorities of Scottish writers in the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time that Black writers were rising to prominence in Scottish letters. Following the referendum on devolved government in 1997, race and racism became even more important negotiations in the national space, evidenced by case studies of three texts directly addressing Blackness in Scotland. This ‘devolving’ of Black Britain parallels the shifting constitutional arrangements in contemporary Britain, implicating not only Scotland but Black British literary studies, which have largely left the integrity of the Union undisturbed. Writing Black Scotland critiques that unifying Britishness, recognisable in a confident state multiculturalism, with reference to the constitutional challenge from Scotland.