‘Sight unseen: black British women and the BBC archive’

To mark a century of British broadcasting, an expansive selection of the BBC’s archives were made public in 2022. Within this centenary arc, the representation of black British women was caught in a double bind. Black actresses who made inroads into mainstream BBC Television were in many ways the subjects of a mediated hypervisibility. Meanwhile black feminist activists who forged significant solidarities in the late twentieth century were conspicuous by their absence in BBC records, echoing broader erasures in histories of feminism. This article reflects on Reclaiming a Lost Past, an intergenerational project I led tied to these contradictions and anchored in debates on the push and pull of visibility. I place these reflections in a wider analysis of the BBC’s entanglement with racial liberalism and of the interplays with a politics of reclamation. Keeping the dangers of co-option in mind, I urge anti-racist feminist media historians to pay closer attention to the knottiness of archival visibility, especially in the context of a cultural liberalism that professes not to “see” race and gender.