Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora

Abstract

Female subjectivity in Africa, as elsewhere, has often been defined by men rather than by women. Black women have fallen victim to a tendency to de-womanize black womanhood - to paraphrase Nigerian playwright 'Zulu Sofola.1 Consequently, films made by African women and men are attempting to rehumanize portrayals of women and to reassert their identities. Furthermore, African women filmmakers are facing the challenge of regaining for women the power of selfdefinition and self-representation. Toward the accomplishment of such goals, new social and political currents in Africa and the black diaspora involve new levels of critical awareness and new challenges to Western intellectual hierarchies. The hegemony of colonialist ideologies and Hollywood domination cannot be excluded from a historical investigation that seeks to provide a nuanced portrait of complex ethnic and cultural questions. For a long time questions of cultural difference have been neglected by the dominant cinema and by dominant media practices, thus discouraging the articulation of an accurate and wholesome black identity. Given the heritage of distorted images, some critics understandably regard the docile ancillary African woman seen in much international cinema today as a media creation.2 Partly for this reason, the calling into question of the native informant, in Gayatri Spivak's term, is the sine qua non of the black woman's film project. As Maureen Blackwood and Martina Attille have noted, black women must be the ones who define the areas of importance in [their] lives: work toward the breakdown of 'mainstream' conventions and popular assumptions perpetuated by existing forms of cinema and television.3 Because of the ways black subjectivity has been constantly abused in films, a new sensitivity