Kenneth W. Harrow. African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings

Africa World Press, 1998. – 356 p. – ISBN: 9780865436961.These essays speak directly and compellingly to contemporary issues in African cinema. They address key aspects of postcolonialism and feminism-the two major topics of interest in current criticism. Issues of spectatorship, national identity, ethnography, patriarchy, women's roles, and the creation of key film industries-issues that animate the discussion of film today, are central to this volume.Although there were filmmaking practices in Africa that date back to the colonial period, the films generally viewed and discussed here by students and critics of African film, those directed by Africans, and those made after independence in the early 1960s. The essays on the formation of three principal national film industries-those of Nigeria, Senegal and the lusophone countries-best exemplify the emergence of African cinema when viewed from the optic of language or nation. In addition, studies of genre, patriarchal structures, spectatorship, and representation, are central to the essays on women's films from Algeria, West Africa, and the Sahel.Stephen Zack's study of Reassemblage offers a brilliant meditation on difference, anthropology and Trinh's positioning in her seminal work. Postcolonial theory is employed and examined in Jonathan Haynes's study of one of Africa's most innovative filmmakers, Jean-Pierre Bekolo. The grounding of a new approach to cinematic art in a specifically African aesthetic is the subject of a study on orality in African cinema by Keyan Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson and Maureen Eke. This is complemented by the studies of individual films, such as Wend Kunni, Yeelen, and Sankofa, films that have had a strong impact on how we think of the African-centeredaesthetic and vision of cinema, of history, of tradition. Emilie Ngo-Nguidjol's bibliographic essay provides invaluable information on sources dealing with African women directors.