The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

"I’m sure that a group of people who brought the British state to its knees can organise themselves.” So argued John Akomfrah, the director of the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs at a screening of the film at Tate Modern last month. Made for the Channel 4 series ‘Britain: The Lie of the Land’, the film was released in 1986, a year after riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and Tottenham. Not surprisingly, given that the Tate had convened the event as a consequence of the recent uprisings in England, the question of the continuities and discontinuities between the 80s and now hung over the whole evening, dominating the discussion that followed the screening. Watched – and listened to – now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless acts of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday.
This is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have ‘progressed’ in any simple linear fashion since Handsworth Songs was made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of new riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Film Quarterly editor Rob White pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now of Handsworth Songs or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less being commissioned. The assumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there were politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more…
The lesson to be remembered – especially now that we are being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again – is that struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George Shire pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost so much as diverted into what he called “the privatisation of politics”, as former activists become hired as ‘consultants’...

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Mark Fisher @'BFI/Sight & Sound'