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

Every now and again a single book changes a discipline. Richard Harvey did this in geography; C. Wright Mills preceded him in sociology. And now Ken Harrow has done it for cinema studies. The short preface to Postcolonial African Cinema offers a subversive exhortation written in the style of manifestos issued by other Africanists on the nature, objectives, and identity of African cinema. Through a layered analysis, Harrow positions his study relative to his critics, to African essentialism, and to critical assumptions embedded in outworn conceptual frameworks, refining the counterargument initially developed in Less than One and Double (Heinemann, 2002).

Harrow's basic argument is that theory remains relevant in the face of essentialist arguments about culture. His study is based on a deep knowledge of African cinema history and literature, an in-depth analysis of films directed by Africans, and most notably, a highly sophisticated application and development of psychoanalytic film theory. Quite simply, Harrow's book is a clear indication that the study of African cinema has not only come of age, but that it is a branch of general cinema studies—not something located on the margins of disciplinary activity, confined to area studies and kept there by the often idiosyncratic musings of scholars whose interests are inseparable from activism, appeals to identity, and an abiding sense of victimhood.

In examining the limitations of critical response to African film criticism—to "clear away" the doctrinaire past through engagement of critical practices—Harrow invokes the now-familiar post-Lacanian and postmodern approaches to destabilize the "metaphysics of presence" (xiii). Laying down the theoretical gauntlet is a task he relishes; here he takes on a whole swath of scholars, activists, and scholarship.

Harrow starts by criticizing Sembène, a foundational figure for many directors who accepted the fundamental assumptions underpinning his project of "revolt" (1) but who failed to question his notion of history. In this, Harrow implicates himself in the limitations prescribed by the old paradigm, but in this book he sets out to develop a new paradigm. Doing so liberates the discussion from concerns with decolonization, revolt, authenticity, and the construction of film criticism around national models, where "the past feels like a straitjacket, with its visions of films tied to categories, and categories tied to political agendas that are themselves unwitting servants to historicist, progressivist Enlightenment thought" (28).

In demolishing the notion of "an authentic African culture" Harrow calls on Slavoj Žižek, a Lacanian film scholar, building on the post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist whose work in film theory has served as the baseline since the 1970s—and hegemonically so, some might argue. Harrow's own psychoanalytic argument is convincing to this reviewer, whose own work has questioned the overemphasis by some on Lacan for African film analysis. But by his reference to Slavoj Žižek, Harrow's critics may again lament his mobilization of yet another European scholar to contextualize African analytical dichotomies. Chapter 5, however, addresses this point, by examining via relational terms the categories imposed by broader African studies; Harrow's point is that a binary of "inside/outside is necessary for a notion of authenticity, since the inside is the site of the authentic and the outside is what gives meaning to that site" (115–16). While Harrow's analysis is too complex to summarize in detail here, suffice it to say that by situating his discussion in a comparative way, he shows how Žižek's concept of "modalities of desire" can be applied across a range of films, no matter their geographic, ethnic, or ideological origins.