Where are the works on British black urban films?

Nwonka traces the ‘concerted erasure of black identity’ from mainstream British film and TV in the 1990s to Top Boy becoming the blockbuster phenomenon it is today. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The black British urban genre should be as valuable to British film culture and academia as the French new wave and British social realism, a leading academic has said.

Clive Nwonka, an associate professor of film, culture and society at UCL, began his academic research in 2010, during a critically important era of black representation in British film and TV.