TRANSGEOGRAPHICAL PRACTICES OF MARRONAGE IN SOME AFRICAN FILMS

Abstract

In this article, I mobilize the notion of ‘marronage’ to analyze the ways in which specific practices of representation allow us to observe transgeographical practices of expression in the films of Raoul Peck, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Jean-Marie Téno. I suggest that the works of these three filmmakers are not relational and do not attempt to recuperate colonial and imperial experience in Africa as a means to remind us about the ‘efficacy’ (effectiveness) of colonialism and imperialism; rather, Peck, Sissako, and Téno's films are full of subjective ideological ‘énoncés’ (statements), which provoke and incite a complex identity group formation that is ‘affective’ in nature: Africani(city). Indeed, I make the case that Peck, Sissako, and Téno use the medium of cinema to articulate ‘political consciousness’ for the creation of a transgeographical mythology, Africani(city). The representation of this cultural mythology helps us examine the sameness and specificity of cultural genocide in post-independent African nations, because these films re-formulate the meaning of blackness as an uncontested régime of truth that is transgeographical, or a-national, in nature, thus contradicting the colonial fabric of national-African identities. Above all, I make the case that such practices of representation could serve as relevant pretexts helping us to open up and re-think through the theoretical limits of the notions of nation and the transnational.