Rethinking African Cultural Production [Paperback]

Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what African means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.

African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History by Carmela Garritano (Ohio University Press, 2013). ISBN 9780896802865.

Rethinking African Cultural Production offers a useful compendium of essays that traces trajectories of debate, identifies a wealth of understudied and emerging areas of scholarship, and exemplifies the diversity of African cultural production as much as scholarship on it. It will be helpful to anyone concerned to reflect on the positionalities and assumptions that structure past and present academic conversations and institutions.

Introduction: Rethinking African Cultural Production Frieda Ekotto and Ken Harrow

1. The Critical Present: Where Is African Literature ? Eileen Julien
2. African Writers Challenge Conventions of Postcolonial Literary History Olabode Ibironke
3. Provocations: African Societies and Theories of Creativity Moradewun Adejunmobi
4. In Praise of the Alphabet Patrice Nganang
5. African Cultural Studies: Of Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies Tejumola Olaniyan
6. Le Freak, Cest Critical and Chic: North African Scholars and the Conditions of Cultural Production in Post 9/11 U.S. Academia Lamia Benyoussef
7. Reading Beur Film Pls‚