As a contemporary iteration of a landmark publication, the scholarly sequel is an expansive form that revisits the past while orienting itself in the present and sometimes gesturing toward the future. Edited by Clive Nwonka and Anamik Saha, Black Film British Cinema II realizes the immense promise of the scholarly sequel in demonstrating the continued relevance of its predecessor, edited by Kobena Mercer, Black Film British Cinema (1988) (volume 7 in the ICA Documents series) while ensuring readers attend to the complexities of the making, circulation, and the very idea of Black British film today. Traces of a possible third iteration become palpable in suggestions for further research dispersed throughout the collection.

Like any good sequel, this collection maintains a certain fidelity to its predecessor. As is the case with Black Film British Cinema, a great strength of this collection rests in Nwonka and Saha's insistence that Black British cinema must be apprehended across a range of contexts, exemplified in the four sections of the book spanning the politics of representation, aesthetics, curation and exhibition, and the politics of diversity. Their multidisciplinary approach, described as a “shared custodianship” across production contexts, audiences, and critical reception, is successfully realized through the breadth of contributors assembled in the collection encompassing activists, curators, scholars, and filmmakers (3–4). Nwonka and Saha's ties to their predecessor are anchored in a second act of custodianship. As Erica Carter explains in her preface, they retrieved Black Film British Cinema, largely unavailable since the 1980s, and worked with the Institute of Contemporary Arts to digitize the publication and return it to the public domain in 2017 (xviii). This story of retrieval and return ignites a deeper understanding of a shared custodianship as a matter of responsibility to and for the past, an additional labor that falls to those dedicated to the study of cinemas whose rich histories go unacknowledged by institutional imperatives and standard pedagogical approaches. Other instances of fidelity include the consistent evocation of Stuart Hall's indispensable “New Ethnicities” first published in Black Film British Cinema, and Nwonka and Saha themselves foreground a notion of Black in Hall's terms as constructed, contingent and “without guarantees” (10). While Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah are revisited in this collection through new interpretations of their work, alongside considerations of new directions in Akomfrah's practice (in chapters by Kara Keeling, Richard Rodriguez, James Harvey, and Alessandra Raengo), the panel discussion on Steve McQueen (Richard Martin, Nwonka, Ozlem Koskal, and Ashley Clark) is a strong example of the collection's engagement with contemporary Black British filmmaking practices.

In the opening contribution to part one, Sarita Malik maps Black British cinema in three acts and deftly situates both recent filmmaking practices and the collection itself in the present moment or in the era of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Malik observes, this third act constitutes a form of “depoliticization” in its avoidance of systemic racialized injustices that continue to structure creative industries and other institutional settings (37). So Mayer's essay can be positioned as a historical response to this shift, one that most directly takes up the idea of a shared custodianship in addressing the absence of definitive histories of the circulation of Black film in the United Kingdom. Mayer's contention that crafting such histories with the help of curators, exhibitors, and audiences “would present the central enchantments of historical continuity and community of practice” is one antidote to the ahistoricism of diversity initiatives bound to the refrain of what is new and emerging while further situating Black British cinema in relation to Black filmmaking traditions around the globe (111). Mayer's essay, alongside Malik's suggestion that scholars consider the spaces of representation, illuminate trajectories of research that we can envision making their way into a future iteration of Black Film British Cinema.

As Carter puts it, the promise of a multidisciplinary approach resides in the connections that may flourish across the often “blockaded roads” between criticism, theory, practice, and action (xvii). In many respects, this volume is a testament to Carter's assertion. A key example involves the relationships between Black British cinema and Black American cinema and culture sketched across the collection. Keeling and Rodriguez trace these relationships as instances of productive exchange in their respective chapters on Arthur Jafa, Akomfrah, and Julien. The panel discussion on McQueen initiates debates involving scholars and critics on the complexities of situating him solely within a Black British cinematic tradition. Melanie Hoyes, in her quantitative study on the roles played by Black actors in British films, and Bidisha, in the collection's most personal reflection, describe the departure of Black British actors to the United States as a “drain” predicated by glass ceiling complexes in the United Kingdom that rival their US counterparts (204, 218). A full and ambivalent picture of these connections emerges, one that could only have arisen from the spectrum of voices brought together in this collection.

The notion of shared custodianships can also evince tensions stemming from clashes between the stakes and aspirations of contributors, as is occasionally the case here. One such tension concerns the value and politics of representation. While Keeling compellingly articulates the significance of Jafa's Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) as a response to the troubling disconnect between representation and material realities perpetuated by neoliberal multiculturalism, Hoyes makes an impassioned case for the importance of minority cultures seeing themselves on screen. Rabz Lansiquot poses the most direct challenge to Hoyes's position: “Instead of asking ‘do I see myself here’ or ‘how will they see me as a result,’ what happens when we ask ‘what does this mean for my freedom?’” (92). That tensions of this nature become discernable are not grounds for critique, though perhaps Nwonka and Saha could have flagged this particular one in their introduction. Rather, this collection provides vital documentation of the central debates of the diversity era transpiring across scholarly, institutional, and artistic channels. As such, Black Film British Cinema II is on its way to becoming a landmark publication, as is the case with its predecessor. Nwonka and Saha's generous act of custodianship makes it possible for readers to put the two works into conversation. All of their labors, including the crafting of this scholarly sequel, contribute to the continued growth of Black British film studies in all of its temporal and contextual registers.