A Companion to African Cinema

An authoritative guide to African cinema with contributions from a team of experts on the topic

A Companion to African Cinema offers an overview of critical approaches to African cinema. With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Companion approaches the topic through the lens of cultural studies, contemporary transformations in the world order, the rise of globalization, film production, distribution, and exhibition. This volume represents a new approach to African cinema criticism that once stressed the sociological and sociopolitical aspects of a film.

The text explores a wide range of broad topics including: cinematic economics, video movies, life in cinematic urban Africa, reframing human rights, as well as more targeted topics such as the linguistic domestication of Indian films in the Hausa language and the importance of female African filmmakers and their successes in overcoming limitations caused by gender inequality. The book also highlights a comparative perspective of African videoscapes of Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire and explores the rise of Nairobi-based Female Filmmakers. This important resource:

• Puts the focus on critical analyses that take into account manifestations of the political changes brought by neocolonialism and the waning of the cold war
• Explores
• Examines the urgent questions raised by commercial video about globalization
• Addresses issues such as funding, the acquisition of adequate production technologies and apparatuses, and the development of adequately trained actors

Written for film students and scholars, A Companion to African Cinema offers a look at new critical approaches to African cinema.

Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Michigan State University with specializations in African literature and cinema. He has taught in the Université de Yaounde, Cameroon and l'Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal.

Carmela Garritano is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and the West African Research Association.

Notes on Contributors x

Introduction: Critical Approaches to Africa’s Cinema, From the Age of Liberation and Struggle to the Global, Popular, and Curatorial 1
Kenneth W. Harrow and Carmela Garritano

Part I Time/Crisis/Uncertainty 21

1 Cinematic Economies of the Hypercontemporary in Haroun and Sissako 23
Justin Izzo

2 Approaching the Uncertain Turn in African Video‐Movies: Subalternity, Superfluity, and (Non‐)Cinematic Time 44
Jacques de Villiers

3 Life in Cinematic Urban Africa: Inertia, Suspension, Flow 69
Karen Bouwer

Part II Trauma/Violence/Precarity in an Age of Global Neoliberalism 89

4 At the Intersection of Trauma, Precarity, and African Cinema: A Reflection on Mahamat‐Saleh Haroun’s Grigris 91
MaryEllen Higgins

5 Reframing Human Rights: Hotel Rwanda (2004), A Screaming Man (2010), Global Conflict, and International Intervention 112
Dayna Oscherwitz

6 “The Invisible Government of the Powerful”: Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Cinema of Power 136
Akin Adesokan

Part III Sound/Form/Dub 155

7 Transcultural Language Intimacies: The Linguistic Domestication of Indian Films in the Hausa Language 157
Abdalla Uba Adamu

8 The (Aural) Life of Neo‐colonial Space 176
Vlad Dima

9 “Outcast Orders” and the Imagining of a Queer African Cinema: A Fugitive, Afro‐Jazz Reading of Karmen Geï 194
Lindsey Green‐Simms

Part IV Platforms/Informality/Archives 217

10 Streaming Quality, Streaming Cinema 219
Moradewun Adejunmobi

11 Between the Informal Sector and Transnational Capitalism: Transformations of Nollywood 244
Jonathan Haynes

12 Nollywood Chronicles: Migrant Archives, Media Archeology, and the Itineraries of Taste 269
Noah Tsika

Part V National Industries/Media Cities/Transnational Flows 291

13 African Videoscapes: Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire in Comparative Perspective 293
Alessandro Jedlowski

14 Nairobi‐based Female Filmmakers: Screen Media Production between the Local and the Transnational 315
Robin Steedman

Part VI Genre/Poetics/Gender 337

15 Darker Vision: Global Cinema and Twenty‐first‐Century Moroccan Film Noir 339
Suzanne Gauch

16 From Ethnography to Essay: Realism, Reflexivity, and African Documentary Film 358
Rachel Gabara

17 New Algerian Cinema: Portrayals of Women in Films Post‐Les années noires 379
Valérie K. Orlando

18 “Qu’elle aille explorer le possible!”: Or African Cinema according to Jean‐Pierre Bekolo 402
P. Julie Papaioannou

Part VII Movement/Fluidity and Aesthetics/Migration 421

19 Relational Histories in African Cinema 423
Sheila Petty

20 Crossing Lines: Frontiers, Circulations, and Identity in Contemporary African and Diaspora Film 444
Melissa Thackway

Part VIII The End of Film Criticism?: The New Beginning of Curation and Bricolage 465

21 Towards Alternative Histories and Herstories of African Filmmaking: From Bricolage to the “Curatorial Turn” in African Film Scholarship 467
Lindiwe Dovey

Index 486

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