Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (review)

Kenneth Harrow begins his study of African cinema by asserting that it is “time for a revolution in African film criticism” (xi). The revolution for which he calls consists of abandoning any assumption that African cinema responds to history, that it responds to Hollywood, that it speaks to Africans, or that it is “African” in any meaningful way. These assumptions, Harrow argues, have dominated the critical study of African cinema, and they were imposed or inherited both from theory, specifically the theory of a “Third Cinema,” and from the cinema itself, most notably from the films of Sembène Ousmane.

The problem with this type of “engaged” historical, materialist criticism, as Harrow sees it, is that it privileges realism, which itself “mimics the structures of credibility that are inevitably enmeshed in hierarchies of power” (15). It thereby renders African cinema, according to Harrow, a continuation of “the incomplete project of colonialism” (37), rather than a break with it. What Harrow calls for, therefore, is a new theory, a postcolonial theory, one that rejects what he terms the Western “aesthetics of depth” that implies “a self that can know itself only in relation to its other” (37). This new theory, Harrow argues, must imagine and articulate African cinema in terms of its ability to “give visibility to the surface” and to “shoot with a distorted lens” (47). For it is only in doing so, Harrow suggests, that African cinema can and can be seen to “resolve the crisis posed by modernity” (47).

What follows Harrow’s call to arms is a series of detailed readings of a number of films by Sembène Ousmane, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cissé, and Djibril Diop Mambety. Harrow reads Sembène’s Xala (1976), for example, as the story of a failed trickster, a film that attempts to articulate an overarching truth, but which ultimately fails. Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996), according to Harrow, is a metafilmic manifesto that “lays claim to the imaginary over the symbolic” (162). Souleymane Cissé’s Finye (1982), he argues, is a “pas de deux of revolt and repression” between a patriarch and a daughter who “defies and defines the patriarchy in all its configurations of power” (175). Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas (1992) he reads as a tale of “an African community that is constructed on an exclusionary principle, one that insists upon the rejection of those outside the simulacrum of truth” (194).

As this summary should demonstrate, these analyses are all framed either through Lacanian or Žižekian psychoanalytic theory, and therein lies what is probably the book’s most obvious point of controversy. First of all, in response to his own call for a new theory of African cinema, Harrow recycles or perhaps re-appropriates an existing one. Moreover, and this for some readers is likely to be a bigger point of contention, the specific theory he has chosen to apply—psychoanalytic theory—is one whose application to African cinema has already been contested. The book, therefore, is likely to appeal most to those who are predisposed to reading cinema in psychoanalytic terms, or at least to those who are not deeply invested in the types of “engaged” theoretical approaches to cinema that Harrow explicitly rejects.