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:Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.114.1.256

1937-5239

Michael T. Martin,

Cinema and Media Studies

Preceded by a substantial corpus of critical essays and books, Kenneth W. Harrow's provocative new study is the latest installment of his sustained interrogation of African film criticism and cinema. He enunciates his project in the first sentence of the book's preface: “It is time for a revolution in African film criticism .… Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view—a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today” (p. xi). No less than a call for a new African “cinematic order,” Harrow's daunting undertaking is a critical “space-clearing” exercise whose objective is to revisit and dispense with prevailing assumptions about African film criticism with its legitimization of filmmaking practices that he asserts “have not substantially changed in forty years” (p. xi). The book comprises a lengthy introduction and nine chapters. In the introduction and first chapter, Harrow proffers a theorized delineation of cinéma engagé, a “socially conscious, politically conscientized” cinema opposed to the colonial/neocolonial project, mapping its historical evolution and nascent expression in Ousmane Sembène's first wave of films. The second chapter—a case study of cinéma engagé—examines the film Xala (1975), Sembène's trenchant critique of the Senegalese bourgeoise. Chapter three further elaborates the engagé stance, complicating it by new “phantasmagoric” approaches in the work of Cameroonian filmmakers Bassek Ba Kobhio and Jean-Marie Teno. Later chapters address films by Djibril Diop Mambèty, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cissé, and Dominique Loreau, among others, whose practices embody principles of engagé cinema, but in less schematic terms. In the final chapter, he examines two “unstudied gems” of African cinema, Un Certain matin (1991) and Parlons Grand-Mère (1989). This chapter is Harrow's delineation of an African postmodernism derived from the encounter of globalization with the African specificity, the consequence of which, he asserts, has been “both the disintegration of the possibilities to create a widely viewed, serious, politicized African cinema, and the explosion of a popular and accessible African video-cinema that eschews the earlier values of engagement” (p. xv).