John Akomfrah

James Harvey's dextrous, perceptive account of John Akomfrah's extraordinary contributions to cinema is a rich and invaluable work of scholarship. Spanning the full breadth of Akomfrah's career to date - from ground-breaking works with the Black Audio Film Collective to more recent gallery installation pieces - Harvey adopts a productive thematic approach, identifying formal and political links between individual works, and between Akomfrah and a variety of other artists, filmmakers and thinkers. Throughout, Harvey repeatedly returns to Akomfrah's deployment of archive materials and of montage techniques, pinpointing the manifold ways in which Akomfrah has innovated with both. This highly readable book is a significant contribution to the study of Black British cinema, experimental and avant-garde film, and the politics of the diaspora. -- Glyn Davis, University of St Andrews, UK This is a timely and important book that traces the concerns and contexts of Akomfrah's oeuvre from the early years of Black Audio Film Collective through to the Four Nocturnes commissioned for the the inaugural Ghana Freedom pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Through close readings and drawing from a wide range of sources this book explains Akomfrah's central role as a commanding film maker of his generation in Britain. Harvey's own theoretical fluency deciphers and explores Akomfrah's preoccupations with iconicity, gesture, memory and montage, siting him finally as a neo expressionist for our epoch. -- Rachel Garfield, The Royal College of Art, London, UK