Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse ed. by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse ed. by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike Connor Ryan (bio) Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse edited by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike. Lexington Books. 2014. $84.78 hardcover; $75.99 e-book. 300 pages. Recent years have fortunately seen the scholarly discourse on African cinema expand considerably, venture into yet-unconsidered critical terrain, and consider new filmic experiences, largely in a reflection of the dramatic diversification and productivity of screen media in Africa today. However, as the study of African cinema shifts, it becomes all the more imperative to take stock and ask how current discourse departs from or returns us to core questions of cultural [End Page 167] representation, ideology, aesthetics, and spectatorship. In this regard, Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse is a welcome addition to the growing perspectives on African film. Edited by the established and knowledgeable film critic Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, the anthology offers important contributions representing a diversity of views from a dozen international scholars with various backgrounds in African history, cultural criticism, media studies, theater studies, and world cinema studies. It also notably features one of Nigeria’s most prolific celluloid filmmakers, Chief Eddie Ugbomah, whose voice comes to us by way of interview dialogue with the editor. This collection acknowledges that African filmmakers have, historically, overcome the continent’s particular and enduring impediments to film production and distribution through a willful desire to assert their voices. As Ukadike states in the introduction, “This book intends to access those voices and analyze the conditions of their production, reception, and interpretation of images. The chapters featured here, especially those that challenge cinematic paradigms through interdisciplinary perspectives, attempt to investigate African cinema as a ‘social force.’”1 Along this line, Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse explores a number of national cinemas—South African, Botswanan, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Egyptian—and employs a flexible range of historical, theoretical, and analytical methods that together offer an overview of past and recent cinematic works as well as thematic, aesthetic, political, and socioeconomic concerns. Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse features essays on new developments in African film studies, such as the intersection of African cinema and mass media, the critical assessment of queer representation, and the proliferation of video film across the continent, as well as several reprinted essays on perennial concerns like the recourse in film and scholarship to binary notions of tradition and modernity and the dismantling of colonial ideology. As a result, the book is valuable as a measure of both change and continuity in the field of African film studies. For example, Martin Mhando’s essay complicates the presumption that African cinema signifies a homogenous field, highlighting the profound differences in cultural, social, and material conditions of filmmaking to which new critical approaches must attend. Thus Mhando calls attention to “a new intersection between media and what it mediates,” considering the impact of globalization on national cinemas and emerging commercial film industries, for instance.2 In a similar vein, Keyan Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson offer an expert overview of the media landscape in South Africa, a nation that still struggles “to undo apartheid forms of control over production and distribution,” which has entailed searching for “a new way of democratizing media, especially cinema, in a world where national cinema industries are threatened generally.”3 Alongside these essays we might add Martin P. Botha’s, which provides a survey of the portrayal of homosexuality in African film (a catalog unavoidably weighted toward South African cinema), and [End Page 168] Neil Parsons’s meticulous inventory of film production in Botswana from the days of local newsreel shoots to the nature documentaries of recent popularity among global audiences.4 Southern Africa is well represented in this anthology. The collection serves up two essays focused specifically on Francophone African film. Sheila Petty provides a compelling reading of the relationality of gender in Malian filmmaker Adama Drabo’s Taafe fanga (1997), arguing that, as we find in the film’s play with gender roles, “gender relations in sub-Saharan African cultures are not immutable and have, in fact, evolved in response to complicated historical and cultural terrain.”5 Aboubakar S. Sanogo undertakes an ambitious analysis of...