Nwonka, Clive Chijioke; (2025) Negotiating Black urban screen identities: Recognition, audio-visual authenticity and Black youth cultures in London. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 10.1177/17416590251345705. (In press).

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Abstract

The popular Black urban filmic and televisual genre is a mode of narrating Black British identity where we observe interactions between a range of social processes that register an impact at the aesthetic level; this being Black urban youthhood as an audio-visual culture and the vernacular expressions of ‘realness’ as its specific cultural value. However, other kinds of audio-visual practices have become central to the way these texts register some claim on Black authenticity, the images and sounds of Black identity offered by the subcultural products of grime, rap, and urban music performance. These practices also reveal the bi-directional production of forms of social knowledge, representation and recognition within the urban text. From one perspective, a counter-construction of the Black urban existence and from another, the alignment with the very criminalised hegemonies of Black urban identity. This article interrogates how different regimes of recognition are embedded in both Black youth’s understandings of their representations on screen, its influence on their behaviour, and how the policing of Black urban music forms provides a vector through which the authenticity of audio-visual representations of ‘Black’ criminality can be both nuanced and accentuated through the urban text’s use of music in its various iterations.

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