Mixed Race Studies

The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle

Journal of Black Studies
Published online before print 2016-03-21
DOI: 10.1177/0021934716638802

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor in Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the two only British big budget movies about transatlantic slavery, Amazing Grace and Belle, the article argues that such films serve as the celluloid hallucinations that reinforce the psychosis of Whiteness. The features of this discourse that arose from the analysis included the lack of Black agency, distancing Britain from the horrors of slavery, and downplaying the role of racism.

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The story behind Dido Belle – the bi-racial Londoner who helped end slavery in Britain

London Evening Standard
2014-01-08

Susannah Butter

Susannah Butter tells the tale of Dido Belle, ahead of the release of a film about her extraordinary life starring Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

Among the many aristocratic faces gazing out of frames in Hampstead’s newly refurbished Kenwood House, there’s one that sticks out. Standing next to Elizabeth Murray in a print of Johann Zoffany’s portrait from c.1799, there is a smiling girl wearing pearls. But although she looks equal to her playmate, she is black. This girl is Dido Belle, the daughter of an enslaved woman. Belle was brought up at Kenwood, a house partially built with “blood money” from the Triangular Trade, and she made her own contribution to the abolition of slavery. A film of her extraordinary life, Belle, is out this spring with a cast including Tom Felton and Miranda Richardson.

It comes after two films examining the black historical experience: British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and Lee Daniels’s The Butler, both set in the United States. But there is another story of slavery that needs telling and it’s set in London…

…Belle was born the illegitimate daughter of Admiral Sir John Lindsay of the Royal Navy and Maria Belle, a slave who he met en route from England to Jamaica around 1761. When Lindsay went back to the navy, he entrusted five-year-old Belle to his uncle, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who lived at Kenwood. Lord and Lady Mansfield had no children of their own but raised Belle with Lady Elizabeth Murray, the daughter of Mansfield’s other nephew, David Murray.

“The idea that there was this girl who was part of our cultural legacy in England — a mixed race woman in the 1780s — hooked me,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the London actress who plays Belle. “Speaking as a mixed-race woman in 2013, there aren’t many historical stories about people like me. When people think of ‘dual heritage,’ they think it’s a modern concept but it’s not. I wanted to do justice to Dido.”…

Read the entire article here.