Hollywood’s Africa after 1994

Abstract

In this book, Mary Ellen Higgins, who has numerous previously published essays on the literary and cinematic representations of human rights, has brought together fifteen intriguing essays by a multidisciplinary community of contributors to examine Hollywood’s representations of Africa. Their historical starting point—1994, the year of the genocide in Rwanda—stems from how that event captured the attention of human rights activists and Hollywood celebrities to yield a symbiosis of sorts in which Hollywood made human rights films and activists saw film as a means to motivate viewer campaigns against human rights violation. These recent films have human rights issues as their “major thrust” but oftenmix the issues withHollywood’s bequeathed legacy of “colonial” tropes that cast Africa as dangerous, exotic, and savage, and render the people and places of the continent as amere backdrop forWestern protagonists and perspectives. The films discussed range in the book from big-budget studio productions to independent and transnational outputs that engage with Hollywood’s legacies. The films are Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Edward Hick’s Blood Diamond, Kevin Macdonald’s Last King of Scotland, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came onHorseback, Phillip Noyce and TomHooper’s Red Dust andCatch a Fire, Darell Roodt’s Dangerous Ground and Cry the Beloved Country, Neil Blompkamp’s District 9, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Anton Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands With the Devil, Fernando Meirellis’s The Constant Gardener, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Newton Aduaka’s Ezra, and Mahmet Selah-Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa. The book’s driving question is: How can Hollywood’s Africa be characterized after 1994 and how has this been challenged, changed, and/or updated? In other BOOK REVIEW