Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinemaone 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 iek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodernbased approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practiceone in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive reading of the political and the ideological. The major works of Sembne Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambty, Souleymane Cisse, JeanPierre Bekolo, JeanMarie 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.