Remediating Transcultural Memory

4.2.1 Recoding news footage: television, whiteness and national memory

In post-war Britain television became the prime medium to establish consent and to create the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) of the nation."193 As an agenda-setting and opinion-forming medium ("Leitmedium") television thus had an impact on the definition of Britishness. Television was characterised by a white hegemony, allowing ethnic minorities only limited access (see Hall 1990b, Malik 2002). Televised racist attitudes and racifying representations on national television affected the population’s sense of (un)belonging to the ‘imagined community’’.194 In 1983 the Black Audio Film Collective observed how hegemonic media were grounded in racist and colonial discourses: ...