Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation [Paperback]

Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.

Filmmaking in service to politics and propaganda

James E. Genova is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University-Marion. He is author of Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956.

Cinema and Development in West Africa achieves the important task of reminding readers that the economic structures of neocolonialism possessed deep tendrils that broadly impacted postcolonial life and politics. Moreover, it clarifies what the political stakes of African cinema were for colonists, nationalists and intellectuals. The descriptions of the hopes, aspirations and political agendas of the pioneering cohort of French West African cin?astes cogently presented by Genova will be of interest to specialists, with prose appropriate for advanced undergraduate classrooms.

Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, the book demonstrates [cinemas] unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign nationhood. May 2014

Genova . . . offers a brisk and instructive overview of the history of cinema in the former French colonies of West Africa . . . Genova's attention to the material conditions of cinematic production is salutol³"