Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse

This book emphasizes the plurality of African cinema through a variety of themes and critical approaches that illuminate the scope of the mobilizing techniques for its proliferation, as well as its deep concern for methods of production, film aesthetics, theory, and criticism. Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse will offer scholars and students in film, media, and cultural studies, as well as in history, and Black and African studies, a broader understanding of African cinema as a cultural art. The contributors show that it is informed not only by ideological determinants but also by the concern to boost perspectives for reading African film images that may or may not belong to the conventional interpretations proffered in Euro-American critical paradigms.

Introduction: Proliferating African Film DiscoursesN. Frank UkadikePart One: Critical PerspectivesChapter 1: Approaches to African Cinema Study: Defining Other BoundariesMartin MhandoChapter 2: Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and its DiscontentsEsiaba IrobiChapter 3: Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African CinemaJude AkudinobiPart Two: History/Discourse and InterventionChapter 4: Queering African Film Aesthetics: A Survey from 1950s to 2003Martin P. BothaChapter 5: African Cinemas and the Role of the State: The Cultural Imperialism ModelRoy ArmesChapter 6: Transformation and South African Cinema in the 1990sKeyan G. Tomaselli and Arnold SheppersonChapter 7: False Dawns Over the Kalahari? Botswana Cinema in Historical PerspectiveNeil ParsonsPart Three: Pluralisms, Expressions, Traits: Reading the TextChapter 8: Chahine¿s Cinematic Alexandria: Egyptian History and Cultural IdentitySuzanne H. MacRaeChapter 9: Critical Dialogues: Transcultural Modernities and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary FilmsN. Frank UkadikeChapter 10: Relational Constructs: Discourses of Gender in Taafe FangaSheila PettyChapter 11: Reconsidering the Sembenian Project: Toward an Aesthetics of ChangeAboubakar S. SanogoPart Four: ¿Reel¿ AfricanizationChapter 12: Video Booms and the Manifestations of ¿First¿ Cinema in Anglophone AfricaN. Frank UkadikeChapter 13: We Can¿t Wait for Oliver Stone: Interview with Eddie UgbomahN. Frank Ukadike