Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse [Hardcover]

This anthology of important and provocative criticism by international authors is a welcome addition to African film studies. It offers an overview of Africas past and present cinematic output and explores themes, styles, politics, and socioeconomic issues. This collection challenges dominant modes of representation and scholarship and defines new paradigms of African film aesthetics. With this publication, and his previous articles and books, N. Frank Ukadike confirms his status as a keen observer and knowledgeable theoretician of African filmmaking.This book emphasizes the plurality of African cinema through a variety of themes and critical approaches that illuminate the scope of the mobilizing techniques for its proliferation, as well as its deep concern for methods of production, film aesthetics, theory, and criticism. Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse will offer scholars and students in film, media, and cultural studies, as well as in history, and Black and African studies, a broader understanding of African cinema as a cultural art. The contributors show that it is informed not only by ideological determinants but also by the concern to boost perspectives for reading African film images that may or may not belong to the conventional interpretations proffered in Euro-American critical paradigms.Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to lay bare the diversity and essence of African cinema discourse. It is an anthology of historical reflections, critical essays, and interviews by film critics, historians, theorists, and filmmakers that signifies a dialogue and engagement apropos the ideology and cultural politics of film production in Africa.The contributors are extremely concerned, not only with the history of African cinema, but with its future and its potential. This book, then, is not limited to the expansion of the discourse on African cinema, but tries to approach the definition of the critical lƒ(