Cinematic Imaginaries Of The African City

This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective. “Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the “African urban”. Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion. Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.

This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

How do government officials, elected politicians, powerful economic actors and ordinary people think and talk about the urban geography of South Africa? How do they describe and represent change that is happening in cities, towns and villages? Do they consider these changes to be good or bad? How do they think such places should change? What do they do to try to bring about the changes they desire? Competing answers to these questions have been at the centre of South Africa’s urban development. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, white minority governments straddled quite contradictory imaginaries about who could build lives for themselves in urban areas and on what terms. Ordinary people held their own urban imaginaries that were quite different to those of white minority governments, and were core to the fight for democracy. In the democratic era, a range of official and popular imaginaries offer diverse visions on how South Africans should be transformed. In an earlier collection produced under the GCRO Spatial Imaginaries project, we explored the sometimes contradictory nature of post-apartheid urban visions with, for example, with some promoting the creation of new urban settlements on greenfield sites, and others attempting to densify and diversify long urbanised spaces. Research Report 13, South African urban imaginaries: Cases from Johannesburg, is a second edited collection under the Spatial Imaginaries project, and it uses a series of cases from Johannesburg that illustrate the interactions between urban imaginaries and the material city. These cases include: the depiction of central business districts in film as spaces of aspiration; the way in which the imaginaries of developers in Hillbrow were shaped by the lives of those living there; the imaginaries of Alexandra Renewal Project practitioners; the way in which residents of Brixton understand diversity; and the construction of two new bridges across the M1 to better connect Sandton and Alexandra.

Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.

In African Film: Re-imagining a Continent, Josef Gugler provides an introduction to African cinema through an analysis of 15 films made by African filmmakers. These directors set out to re-image Africa; their films offer Western viewers the opportunity to re-imagine the continent and its people. As a point of comparison, two additional films on Africa--one from Hollywood, the other from apartheid South Africa--serve to highlight African directors' altogether different perspectives. Gugler's interpretation considers the financial and technical difficulties of African film production, the intended audiences in Africa and the West, the constraints on distribution, and the critical reception of the films.

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century brings together a set of fascinating essays by international scholars on these contrasting cinema forms.

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city. Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.