The colors of desire. Alterity, race and sex in British cinema

Abstract

From the analysis of four movies from different periods of British cinema (Black narcissus, 1947, by Powell & Pressburger, A Taste of Honey, 1962, by Tony Richardson, A Passage to India, 1984, by David Lean and My Beautifyl Laundrette, 1985, by Stephen Frears) we are going to examin the Realist tradition and the transformations in the discourse and in the images on race and sexuality over the mid-20th century. The History of British cinema suggests, sometimes quite straight and enphatic, that there are intrinsic connexions between racism and sexuality. We are going to observe the recurrences and differences between the representations of alterity in the movies we have studied to better understand this connexions.