| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores the role of race, racism, and colonialism in British cinema culture of the 1920s and early 1930s. It argues firstly that silent film performance is received as a racialised element of film form in Britain; race is ‘read’ by British audiences into movements, gestures, and expressions. This is inflected by colonial constructions of racialised bodies and imperial geographies: the intimacies and distances between racialised groups that theorists argue underpin racial difference. Whereas many scholars have demonstrated that interwar British cinema entails performances of class, gender and national identities, this thesis foregrounds the performance of racial identity, often in ways which override or obscure these other social distinctions.</p>
<p>Secondly, it posits that this performance of racial difference informs constructions of taste, decorum, and style in British cinema. Racialised performance determines perceptions of cinema’s effect on the body—of both performers and spectators—and the way it represents and disseminates British cultural and imperial heritage and history. Through performances of race, British filmmakers and critics construct cinema as entertainment, art form, historical record, and colonial educational tool. This thesis takes the reception and production in Britain of four case study genres, the ‘Eastern’, the Limehouse melodrama, the expedition film and the British documentary, to evidence this. Representing different kinds of racialised performance, inflected by the specific settings and forms of racialised encounter depicted in each genre, these case studies raise different aesthetic and political concerns that are all explored through the racialised bodies that take centre stage.</p>
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