AMHP 27A01 - African Politics and Cinema: mediating the political through the cinematic lens

Since its inception, cinema in Africa has always been eminently political. Invented just ten years after the European powers divided up the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, cinema served from the start to construct and convey colonial ideology, and was subject to strict censorship and control. As colonial subjects were banned from filmmaking, it was not until the Independence era that Africans started to make their own films (Egypt aside). This context has lastingly marked African cinema and its relation to representational issues – a cinema which, furthermore, came into existence at a time of the liberation movements' intense political, intellectual and artistic exchanges and circulations (the Bandung Conference, the Tricontinental, the Pan-African Conferences...). In this context, many African filmmakers opted for a politically-engaged cinema rooted in, and reflecting on, the continent's socio-political realities and at the service of their peoples. Viewing and analyzing a corpus of major African films from around the continent, spanning from the 1960s to the present, contextualizing them within the political events and moments they portray – events that trace the continent's key political developments from the colonial liberation struggles, to questions of neo-colonialism, Cold War conflict, dictatorship/democracy, militant Islam, to the Arab revolutions – we shall examine the links between cinema, cinematic representation and politics in Africa.

Melissa THACKWAY

Cours magistral seul

English

Lectures demandées : Extracts of : Toward a Third Cinema, Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino ; the 1975 FEPACI Algiers Charter ; Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History, Dipesh Chakrabarty ; Autres feminismes : Quand la femme africaine repousse les limites de la pensée et de l'action féministes, Obioma Nnaemeka ; Boy-Wives and Female Husbands : Studies of African Homosexualities, Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe ; Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality, Ramon Grosfoguel. Lectures complémentaires / filmographie / discographie : Corpus of films*: Afrique, je te plumerai, Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon, 1992); Teza, Haile Gerima (Ethiopia, 2008); Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali, 2014); Rafiki, Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya, 2018); Clash, Mohamed Diab (Egypt, 2013).

Spring 2020-2021

- Class Exposé – 30% - Mid Term – 30% - Final Exam – 40%