Postcolonial African Cinema

by Harrow, Kenneth W.

• ISBN13: 9780253219145
• ISBN10: 0253219140
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinema -- one that requires that we revisit the beginnings of African filmmaking and the critical responses to which they gave rise, and that we ask what limitations they might have contained, what price was paid for the approaches then taken, and whether we are still caught in those limitations today.Using Zizek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodern-based approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practice -- one in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive reading of the political and the ideological. The major works of Sembène Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cisse, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno, Bassak ba Kohbio, and Fanta Nacro are explored, while at the same time the project of current postmodern theory, especially that of Jameson, is called into question in order that an African postmodernist cultural enterprise might be envisioned.

Author Biography

Kenneth W. Harrow is Professor of English at Michigan State University. His publications include Threshold of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition, Less Than One and Double, and African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings.

Table of Contents

Preface: Out with the Authentic, In with the Wazimamoto

Introduction: The Creation of a Cinema Engagé

Sembène'sXalathe Fetish and the Failed Trickster

Cameroonian Cinema: Ba Kobhio, Teno, and the Technologies of Power

From Jalopy to Goddess:Quartier Mozart, Faat KineandDivine Carcasse

Toward a Äi ekian Reading of African Cinema

Aristotle's Plot:What's Inside the Can?

Finye:The Fantasmic Support

Hyenas:Truth, Badiou'sEthicsand the Return of the Void

Toward a Postmodern African Cinema: Fanta Nacro's "Un Certain Matin" and Djibril Diop Mambéty'sParlons Grand-mère

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