AAAD 202: African Film and Performance: Finding Books
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- Keyword: Postcolonialism and African film
- Associated Subject Headings: "Motion pictures -- Africa -- History -- 20th century"
- Associated Subject Headings: "Motion pictures -- Africa, Sub-Saharan -- History"
- Keyword: Filmmaking and Africa
- Associated Subject Headings: "Motion picture industry -- Africa"
- Associated Subject Headings: "Motion pictures -- Social aspects -- Africa"
- Keyword: African performance
- Associated Subject Headings: "Popular music -- Africa -- History and criticism"
- Associated Subject Headings: "Aesthetics, African"
Books
Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse by
Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to lay bare the diversity and essence of African cinema discourse. It is an anthology of historical reflections, critical essays, and interviews by film critics, historians, theorists, and filmmakers that signifies a dialogue and engagement apropos the ideology and cultural politics of film production in Africa. The contributors are extremely concerned, not only with the history of African cinema, but with its future and its potential. This book, then, is not limited to the expansion of the discourse on African cinema, but tries to approach the definition of the critical canon within the exigencies and manifestations of art and African sociopolitical practices. The authors view these practices as an investment in a cultural imperative stemming from the quest to delineate how critical methodologies are derived from and shape contemporary historical and cultural practices. Hence, the contributions are less about the usual constrictive method of analysis and more about illustrating manifestations of an interrogative critical methodology that is certainly an offspring of an indigenous African critical cum cinematic culture and paradigms.
ISBN: 9780739180945Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Performing Africa by
The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.
ISBN: 9781400825219Publication Date: 2009-04-11
Griots and Griottes by
On May 17, 1967, the American writer Alex Haley went to Juffure, a village in The Gambia on what was once the western fringe of the Mali empire. There he met a griot, or jali, who recounted a story about Haley's roots in Africa. Haley was trying to reconstruct his past, an African heritage which had been nearly erased by the slave trade and the experience of his African-American ancestors as slaves. Haley used some of this information to write Roots, which appeared in 1976 and led to an explosion of interest in geneology in the United States and other parts of the world. The television version of the story drew the largest single audience in the history of American television. Roots II, a sequel showed how Haley went about the research for the book, and many viewers saw a Mandinka jali, or griot, for the first time, the late Alhaji Bai Konte, playing the role of the man who told Haley the story about Kunta Kinte. Roots introduced griots to the world outside of West Africa and generated an enormous amount of interest in their profession. Griots and Griottes is the first comprehensive portrait of the world of this profession, starting with their discovery by the outside world in 1352 by a North African traveler, Ibn Battuta, up to the time of Alex Haley and the present. Griots in their multiple roles and functions are unique to Africa. They play many roles in society -- geneologist, historian, spokesperson, diplomat, musician, teacher, warrior, praise singer, master of ceremonies, and advisor. Griots and Griottes, based on over thirty years of research and travel in Africa, tells the story of these remarkable wordsmiths and performers.
ISBN: 0253334586Publication Date: 1999-03-22
Introduction to African Oral Literature and Performance by
This book brings together in one volume two earlier books by the authors, now revised to meet the callenges of 21st century scholarship in African performance and cultural studies. Topics covered range from sources of oral traditions, the relevance of cosmology to oral performance, myths and legends, occupational and heroic poetry to name but a few. The central theme is performance and the reader is provided with projects and exercises intended to keep them involved in research and performance experience.
ISBN: 1592211518Publication Date: 2004-03-01
Cinema and Development in West Africa by
Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.
ISBN: 9780253010087Publication Date: 2013-09-25
Contemporary African Cinema by
African and notably sub-Saharan African film's relative eclipse on the international scene in the early twenty-first century does not transcend the growth within the African genre. This time period has seen African cinema forging a new relationship with the real and implementing new aesthetic strategies, as well as the emergence of a post-colonial popular cinema. Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.
ISBN: 9781609174972Publication Date: 2016-08-01
Books
Images Out of Africa by
Missionaries played a fundamental role in introducing cinema into the developing world in the early twentieth century. These representatives of the Christian community diligently produced films about far-flung cultures to bolster fundraising for mission efforts around the globe. By the interwar period, a few husband-and-wife teams in Africa were making an array of films about vanishing cultures and the struggle to bring Christianity to indigenous populations. Images Out of Africa brings to light the remarkable expedition of one such team of filmmakers. In 1938, Virginia and Ray Garner, working for the Africa Motion Picture Project, ambitiously began making films in the Belgian Congo and French Cameroons, introducing film into villages for the first time. This book features Virginia Garner's recently rediscovered diaries, which highlight the challenges of making films in Africa in the 1930s and include rich descriptions of cross-cultural interactions and micro-negotiations with chiefs, headmen, and villagers.
ISBN: 9780761853824Publication Date: 2011-03-16
The Beautiful Skin by
In this original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature, Vlad Dima investigates the way that football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies, and highlights where football and cinema converge and diverge with regard to neocolonial fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Touré, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukouré, and Joseph Gaï Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question requires the exploration of body and identity issues, here through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has visual, aural, and haptic qualities. The neocolonial body is often depicted as suffering and in the process of being flattened or emptied. So frequently do African cinema and literature replicate this hollowed body, all skin as it were, that it becomes the very type of body that defines neocolonialism. Could the body of film--the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin--hold the key to moving into a post-neocolonial era, an era defined by "full" bodies and personal affirmation? This is the question Dima seeks to answer.
ISBN: 9781611863703Publication Date: 2020-09-01
Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora by
Analyzing art house films from the African continent and theAfrican diaspora, this book showcases a new generation of auteurswith African origins from political, aesthetic, and spectatorshipperspectives. Focuses on art house cinema and discusses commercial Africancinema Enlarges our understanding of African film to include thematicand aesthetic influence Highlights aesthetic and political aspects including racialidentity, women?s issues, and diaspora Heavily illustrated with over 90 film stills Features selected stills integral to the filmic analysis infull color Moves beyond Western-oriented analytical paradigms
ISBN: 9781405193030Publication Date: 2014-06-23
African Cinema and Human Rights by
Bringing theory and practice together, African Cinema and Human Rights argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations. With its interdisciplinary scope, attention to practitioners' self-understandings, broad perspectives, and particular case studies, African Cinema and Human Rights is a foundational text that offers questions, reflections, and evidence that help us to consider film's ideal role within the context of our ever-continuing struggle towards a more just global society.
ISBN: 9780253039439Publication Date: 2019-03-01
ISBN: 9781443886499
African Cinemas by
This book is both a personal journey and an introduction to the cinema cultures of Africa. A book about the politics of cultural survival, it is also a major overview of African cinema and television. The first part of the book traces the development of African cinema - from colonization to Afrocentrism. The author examines this development through a variety of fundamental themes: the decolonization of the imagination; the quest for legendary African origins and the mobilization of African cultural values. The second part of the book analyses specific films, particularly through narrative and in terms of their African specificity - in the use of silence, orality and humour. Finally, the author explores the social and economic contexts of the African cinema and television industry - including its often vexed relations with the West and the problems of production and distribution African film-makers face. Exploring the achievements and challenges of those who seek to affirm African cultural values through film, the book also covers the African television industry and African-American cinema. It includes interviews with film-makers, stills from the films and, ultimately, a plea for seeing and respecting the otherness of the Other. Winner of the French National Film Centre's best filmbook of 1997 and now available in four languages, this is book which takes us into a process of learning how to look.
ISBN: 1856497437Publication Date: 2000-10-01
Books
Flickering Shadows by
Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Flickering Shadows is the first book to explore this little-known world of colonial cinema. J. M. Burns pieces together the history of the cinema in Rhodesia, examining film production, audience reception, and state censorship, to reconstruct the story of how Africans in one nation became consumers of motion pictures. Movies were a valued "tool of empire" designed to assimilate Africans into a new colonial order. Inspired by an inflated confidence in the medium, Rhodesian government offcials created an African Film industry that was unprecedented in its size and scope. Transforming the lives of their subjects through cinema proved more complicated than white officials had anticipated. Although Africans embraced the medium with enthusiasm, they expressed critical opinions and demonstrated decided tastes that left colonial officials puzzled and alarmed. Flickering Shadows tells the fascinating story of how motion pictures were introduced and negotiated in a colonial setting. In doing so, it casts light on the history of the globalization of the cinema. This work is based on interviews with white and black filmmakers and African audience members, extensive archival research in Africa and England, and viewings of scores of colonial films.
ISBN: 0896802248Publication Date: 2002-04-15
Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution by
In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new socialist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had little previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to "deliver to the people an image of the people". This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and cinema played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and testimonies of key participants, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution provides a compelling account of this radical experiment in harnessing cinema to socialchange.ROS GRAY is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Critical Studies) in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London
ISBN: 9781847012371Publication Date: 2020-01-17
Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century by
African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in 1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These "Nollywood" films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes. Contributors: Ralph A. Austen and Mahir Şaul, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Birgit Meyer, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, Vincent Bouchard, Laura Fair, Jane Bryce, Peter Rist, Stefan Sereda, Lindsey Green-Simms, and Cornelius Moore
ISBN: 9780821419311Publication Date: 2010-10-05
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