"I Do Not Know That I Find Myself Anywhere": The British Heritage Film and Spaces of Intersectionality in Amma Asante's Belle (2013)

This chapter examines issues of place and placelessness in Amma Asante’s British heritage film, Belle (2014). Narratively foregrounding the complexity of its protagonist’s identity, Belle offers a significant opportunity for an intersectional analysis of race, class and gender representations in British heritage cinema. Moreover, the first British heritage film with a multiracial woman as its lead protagonist, Belle enables an explicit interrogation of the British heritage film’s ubiquitous whiteness. Centering my analysis on Belle’s representation of the country house – a symbol of white, patriarchal authority – this chapter examines how Asante stages her wealthy multiracial protagonist. Arguing that the film’s use of this space paradoxically upholds and challenges the hegemonic whiteness of the genre, this chapter argues that Belle provides a complex representation of a woman of color’s subjectivity in a genre that so often marginalizes, ignores or erases her existence.