Ousmane Semb Ne

This book explores the concept of space, or rather spaces, in relation to translation, to construct a conceptual framework for research to better understand and solve translation problems. A number of interrelated spatial perspectives on translation supported by empirical evidence are presented to help better understand the complexities between China and West in cultural exchanges and to offer a way of explaining what happens to translation and why it takes on a particular form. In the chequered history of Chinese-Western cultural exchange, effective communication has remained a great challenge exacerbated by the ultimate inescapability of linguistic and cultural incommensurability. It is therefore necessary to develop conceptual tools that can help shed light on the interactive association between performativity and space in translation. Despite the unfailing desire to connect with the world, transnational resistance is still underway in China. Further attempts are required to promote a convergence of Chinese and Western translation theories in general and to confront problems arising from translation practice in particular. This work will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies around the world, as well as those working in cultural studies and cross-cultural communication studies.

Collected interviews with the African filmmaker who directed Black Girl, Mandabi, Xala, Ceddo, Faat Kine, and Moolaade

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

Set in the 1950s, this book tells of Diaw Falla, a docker for whom work exists merely to finance his true obsession - his writing. As his novel nears completion, he meets Ginette Tontisanne whose good connections ensure he is published - but, to his dismay, under her name.

Manthia Diawara provides an insider's account of the history and current status of African cinema. African Cinema: Politics and Culture is the first extended study in English of Sub-Saharan cinema. Employing an interdisciplinary approach which draws on history, political science, economics, and cultural studies, Diawara discusses such issues as film production and distribution, and film aesthetics from the colonial period to the present. The book traces the growth of African cinema through the efforts of pioneer filmmakers such as Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Oumarou Ganda, Jean-René Débrix, Jean Rouch, and Ousmane Sembène, the Pan-African Filmmakers' Organization (FEPACI), and the Ougadougou Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO). Diwara focuses on the production and distribution histories of key films such as Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl and Mandabi (1968) and Souleymane Cissé's Fine (1982). He also examines the role of missionary films in Africa, Débrix's ideas concerning 'magic, ' the links between Yoruba theater and Nigerian cinema, and the parallels between Hindu mythologicals in India and the Yoruba-theater - inflected films in Nigeria. Diawara also looks at film and nationalism, film and popular culture, and the importance of FESPACO. African Cinema: Politics and Culture makes a major contribution to the expanding discussion of Eurocentrism, the canon, and multi-culturalism.