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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Three of Ngozi Onwurah’s exceptional shorts were screened at the fifteenth London Short Film Festival this January Ngozi was a member of the late 1980s avant-garde, making socio-political films about the experiences of marginalised people She was also the only Black British female filmmaker to have a feature film – Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) – released in UK cinemas for a long damn time   My favourite of the three was The Body Beautiful (1991), a deeply empathetic exploration of the relationship between physical disability and sexuality, aided by extraordinary aesthetic imagery Neither documentary nor fiction, the film opens with the shot of a white mother and black daughter, naked and embracing Ngozi casts Sian Ejiwumi-Le Berre as her teenage self, and her real mum, Madge Onwurah, in the lead role The young Ngozi is working as a fashion model, and she is forced to conform to the stereotype of the highly sexualised black woman on set – her photographer calls for her to give ‘sex’ and ‘passion’ Madge has lost a breast to cancer and suffers from rheumatoid arthritis While Ngozi possesses a casual confidence, and is realising her sexual appeal as a young mixed race woman, Madge is experiencing post-surgery anxiety Part way through the film, a scene of a tender, uninhibited, erotic fantasy between Madge and a young black man is a reminder that disability does not erode sexuality It’s beautiful and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this on screen, ever   At the close of The Body Beautiful, the shot of mother and daughter embracing is repeated Only once we’ve witnessed the intertwining of their experiences does the full significance of this embrace become clear – it carries the weight of inclusion and exclusion, of a mother and daughter, each gifted with something the other cannot access   Coffee Coloured Children (1988) takes a gruelling look at growing up mixed-race in 1980s England It begins pleasantly, with archive footage of people of various ethnicities, accompanied by the fitting Blue Mink song ‘Melting Pot’ – but the tone shifts very quickly The voices of two children, a brother and sister, narrate

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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feature

Issue No. 5

Choose Your Own Formalism

David Auerbach

feature

Issue No. 5

1. ALL SQUARES RESIDE IN THE HUMAN BREAST In 2007 game designer and Second Life CEO Rod Humble wrote...

fiction

January 2012

Collapse - A Memoir

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

January 2012

Author’s Note   I began writing about the war five years after it was over; a war the world...

fiction

January 2015

Adventures in Immediate...

Max Blecher

TR. Michael Henry Heim

fiction

January 2015

I can picture myself as a small child wearing a nightshirt that comes down to my heels. I am...

 

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