Böcker i African Humanities and the Arts-serien

Examines the ways in which national and transnational forces have shaped the representation of race and nation in feature-length narrative fiction films in South Africa.

Now available in English for the first time, translated by the poet Jack Hirschman, this beautiful collection of poems by the Algerian poet Jean Senac (1926-1973) was originally published when he was forty-one. Senac represented the hope of the new generation of Algerians who were celebrating their independence from France after 130 years of colonialism, and in the tradition of Rene Char and the early Albert Camus, he portrayed an Algeria whose land and people would finally sing with their own voice. Senac celebrates revolution, love, and the body, beginning with the resonant verses: "e;And now we'll sing love / for there's no Revolution without love."e; He sang, as well, of beauty: "e;No morning without smiling. / Beauty on our lips is one continuous fruit."e;

The Lieutenant of Kouta is the first novel in Massa Makan Diabate's award-winning trilogy. Featuring an introduction by leading Diabate scholar Cheick M. Cherif Keita and Shane Auerbach, it tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of Europe to Kouta, a fictionalized version of the author's own birthplace, the Malian town of Kita. Upon his return, Siriman Keita finds it difficult to adjust to village life as he navigates traditional customs in his attempts to create his place in the predominantly Muslim Kouta. The novel offers a rich and nuanced representation of Mali on the brink of independence; it is a tapestry of traditional Mandinka society and the French colonial apparatus, illustrating the dynamic interplay between the two. This text is, ultimately, a story of one man's transformation coinciding with that of his country.

This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon's career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of "e;primitive art"e; and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon's narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of "e;sending home"e; a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of "e;difference."e; As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.

African and notably sub-Saharan African film's relative eclipse on the international scene in the early twenty-first century does not transcend the growth within the African genre. This time period has seen African cinema forging a new relationship with the real and implementing new aesthetic strategies, as well as the emergence of a post-colonial popular cinema. Drawing on more than 1,500 articles, reviews, and interviews written over the past fifteen years, Olivier Barlet identifies the critical questions brought about by the evolution of African cinema. In the process, he offers us a personal and passionate vision, making this book an indispensable sum of thought that challenges preconceived ideas and enriches an approach to cinema as a critical art.

Dorcas Keurleonan-Moricet is a brilliant white geophysicist posted on assignment in Africa. She falls in love with a young African man, Segue n'Di, and enters into an extramarital affair with him. In her professional work, she discovers deposits of minerals of inestimable worth. Reading the current age of globalization and neoliberalism as one in which the riches of Africa are again being cynically exploited by multinational companies-including her own-Keurleonan-Moricet's views and her life gradually change. As the popular resistance against the dictatorial regime in power grows, she comes to play a key role in the unfolding political drama.

Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Toure, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukoure, and Joseph Gai Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema.

Analyses the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity. Having left the continent, these filmmakers see Africa as a site of representation and cultural circulation. The diasporic experience displaces the centre and forges new syncretic identities.

Attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance, each in its own way. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre.

Assembles lectures given by Pius Adesanmi that address the questions of African sovereignty in the twenty-first century. Adesanmi sought to create an African world of signification in which verbal artistry interpellates performer and audience in a heuristic process of knowledge production.

Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampate Ba of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.

While Albert Camus is an internationally acclaimed figure, Jean Senac has struggled to gain recognition, even in France and Algeria. Their correspondence, translated here, are the intimate dialogue between two men who had much in common and who shared a deep love for each other and for their homeland.

To highlight the ever-growing production and success of comedies and other popular genres in West Africa, this book explores the distribution and reception of selected productions by emphasizing the public's strong resonance with local stories and a character-based comedy involving popular comedians.

The essays, interviews, and cartoons presented in this innovative book vividly demonstrate the rich diversity of cartooning across Africa and highlight issues facing its cartoonists today, such as sociopolitical trends, censorship, and use of new technologies.

This collection of essays and interviews on cinema in Ethiopia establishes a broad foundation for furthering research on this topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic the collection offers new and alternative narratives for the development of screen media in Africa.

The first novel to be translated from Wolof to English, Doomi Golo is a masterful work that conveys the story of Nguirane Faye and his attempts to communicate with his grandson before he dies.

A stirring introduction to the poetry of Euphrase Kezilahabi, one of Africa's major living authors, published here for the first time in English. His poetry confronts the task of postcolonial nation building and its conundrums, and explores personal loss in parallel with nationwide disappointments.