Overview

This book traces the developments in African films that were made from the 1990s to the present within the evolving frame of what came to be called ‘World Cinema’ and, eventually, ‘Global Cinema.’ Kenneth W. Harrow explores how, from the time video and then digital technologies were introduced in the 1990s, and then again, when streaming platforms assumed major roles in producing and distributing film between the 2010s and 2020s, African cinema underwent enormous changes. He highlights how the introduction of the continent’s first successful commercial cinema, Nollywood, shifted the focus from engagé films, with social or political messages, to entertainment movies, but also auteur cinema. Harrow explores how this transformation liberated African filmmakers and resulted in an incredible, enduring flow of creative, inventive, and thoughtful filmmaking. This book presents a number of those critical films that mark that trajectory, projecting a new sense of African film spaces and temporalities, while also highlighting how African films continue to find independent pathways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African cinema and world cinema, as well as researchers specifically examining African cinemas and their relationship to globalization.

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9781032502526

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Reviews

An account of the shifting temporalities, spatialities, and formalities of African cinema by one of the finest scholars of African cultural productions. Kenneth W. Harrow rigorously redefines the contours of world cinema with a brilliant turn to the worldmaking projects of African films, running the gamut from video production to digital film. The resulting book is smartly historicist, formally innovative, and theoretically intelligent. Harrow has produced a field-shaping book. - Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, Yale University Harrow's book - original, eccentric, provocative - establishes African cinema from the long 1990s to the present as a singular, powerful alternative to world cinema. Translating from quantum mechanics to critical theory, Harrow brilliantly reframes key issues raised by postcolonial theory, deconstruction, and apparatus theory. - Carmelo Garritano, Associate Professor of International Affairs and Africana Studies, Texas A&M University

Author Information

Kenneth W. Harrow is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University. His work focuses on African cinema and literature. He is the author of Thresholds of Change in African Literature (1993), Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women’s Writing (2001), Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (2007), Trash! A Study of African Cinema Viewed from Below (2013), and Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes (2022). He also co-edited, with Carmela Garritano, A Companion to African Film (2018).

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