‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe and the Cultural Politics of Leadership
New Formations - Print ISSN 0950-2378 - Online ISSN 1741-0789
Volume 2024 Number 113
‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe and the Cultural Politics of Leadership
Dhanveer Singh Brar, Ashwani Sharma pages 30‑50
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:113.02.2024
Abstract
In this article we undertake a reading of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a collection of five films produced for the BBC and Amazon in 2020. Focused on a series of events and figures central to the making of modern Black British consciousness over the 1970s and 1980s, we suggest that Small Axe is preoccupied by a set of narrative questions concerning leadership, authority and individuation, combined with an aesthetics of suspension, the interval and the look. Speaking to the contemporary moment in Black Britain, as much as a sense of historical verisimilitude, we frame our reading of Small Axe through the rebellions which followed the police shooting to death of Mark Duggan on 4 August 2011.
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To cite this article
Dhanveer Singh Brar, Ashwani Sharma (2024) ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe and the Cultural Politics of Leadership, New Formations, 2024(113), 30-50 . https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:113.02.2024