Race on Screen

This book examines how audience ‘wants’ were envisioned in the twentieth century in relation to race on film and television by a range of interested parties, including film producers, television executives, scriptwriters and researchers in the nascent field of ‘audience research.’ It details how British audiences were repeatedly imagined as racially innocent by these parties, even as they were offered highly racialized content on screen and even as emergent fields like audience research were uncovering consistent evidence of racial prejudice among viewers. It further examines how Black and south Asian audiences worked to counter the dominant narratives of race on screen by claiming their own roles as overlooked audiences and authoring alternative notions of success in twentieth century Britain.