Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism

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 Žižek, 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.

"Every now and again a single book changes a discipline. Richard Harvey did this in geography; C. Wright Mills preceded him in sociology. And now Ken Harrow has done it for cinema studies. The short preface to Postcolonial African Cinema offers a subversive exhortation written in the style of manifestos issued by other Africanists on the nature, objectives, and identity of African cinema. Through a layered analysis, Harrow positions his study relative to his critics, to African essentialism, and to critical assumptions embedded in outworn conceptual frameworks, refining the counterargument initially

developed in Less than One and Double (Heinemann, 2002)." --Keyan A. Tomaselli, AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW, Volume 52.2, September 2009 Indiana University Press

"[This book] is at once a strange and exciting work worthy of attention..." --Film International, Issue 47 Indiana University Press

"[A] welcome and important addition to the literatures on African cinema, and beyond that, on the praxis of cultural production in Africa and elsewhere." --Akin Adesokan, Indiana University

A new critical approach to African cinema

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.