Introduction

There has seldom been a more propitious and exciting moment to study African cinema and media than today. The current configuration of the object referred to by the phrase “African cinema and media” and the discourses that seek to account for it, surround it, and in some cases make it visible are best perceived as being under the sign of the multiple. This indeed is the age of the proliferation of objects and a multiplication of discourses that seek to keep pace with developments in a field in perpetual motion.

The debates that rage in African cinema and media encompass the fields of the theoretical, the historiographic, and the critical, and indeed include the question of the articulation of the cultural, the political, and the economic. Chief among them (this is a nonexhaustive compendium) is arguably the question of the identity of the object (What, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, are the “cinema” and the “media” in African cinema and media? What is the “African” in African cinema and media?).¹ These questions lead to the problem of naming: How should the object be referred to? African film/cinema studies? Media studies? Screen studies? Moving-image studies? Screen media studies?² The advent of Nollywood and the question of the status of video add both complexity and uncertainty regarding the object. Is Nollywood cinema or video? Movie or film? What is this category known as the “video film”? What might its relationship be to film theory? To video theory? To television and television theory? To aesthetics? Could Nollywood be discussed on the same continuum with Touki bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1973) or Heremakono (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002)? Should Nollywood instead be analyzed in its own positivity, that is, as partaking in all the above and (potentially) more while remaining resolutely irreducible to either?

Another key site of debates in the field relates to an interrogation of the appropriate mode of accounting for the object around the dialectic of its generalizability and contingency. In that context the question of theory and theorizing has a particular resonance namely as it relates to the question of whether African cinema is an object of study like any other, which ought to be approached accordingly. Within this axis of debates a number of questions are raised: What is or might be the relationship of African cinema as an object and set of practices to so-called “Western” theory? Is it, or should it be, regarded in terms of the vampirism of applied theory, of epistemic violence, of “raw material” to be processed by the logos of “Western” theory, or should it instead be seen as a productive and mutually beneficial dialogue? Could “Western” theory offer useful insight for the study of African cinema? Conversely, could studies in African cinema and media help jettison a priori and aporias in so-called “Western” theory, itself unduly substantialized and presented as autotelic?

A major corollary to this debate is the status of oral culture and indeed of notions of cultural specificity as the most desirable and effective modes of inquiry into African cinema as an object.³ What might some of the distinguishing features of African cinema be? Can the multimillennial cultural heritage of the African continent be productively brought to bear on the object known as African cinema? How might this be helpful in producing theories, aesthetics, and politics of cinema in Africa? Is it acceptable to study African cinema without a minimum knowledge of aspects of African culture? Of African languages? Can African cinema be properly understood outside of such considerations?

Yet another strain of the debate seeks to examine the role contemporary African and Afro-diasporic thinkers might play in efforts to theorize African cinema. While in the past such African and Afro-diasporic figures as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and W. E. B. Du Bois were used, in more recent years, thinkers like Valentin Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy, among others, have been deployed in an effort to think the contemporary in relation to the cinema.⁴

African cinema and media is also the site of the emergence of new objects either from...