In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Trash: African Cinema from Below by Kenneth W. Harrow
  • Beatriz Leal Riesco (bio)
Trash: African Cinema from Below
by Kenneth W. Harrow. Indiana University Press.
2013. $76.50 hardcover; $27.00 paper. 327 pages.

A book written quickly, moved by a sense of urgency and a need to correct past errors, Kenneth W. Harrow’s Trash: African Cinema from Below is the rough draft of an ambitious project: the offering of a change of paradigm with regard to the understanding and analysis of contemporary African films. It can be read as an extended postscript to his Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism, in which he opposes a postmodernist reading to the first African films and early theoretical works centered on themes of national liberation and the agenda of a politically engaged third cinema.1 At that time he wrote: “It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in forty years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view—a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.”2

Trash is exemplary of a revisionary moment for African cinema criticism and theory in the academy, marked by an exponential growth of publications: Manthia Diawara’s African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Alexie Tcheuyap’s Postnationalist African Cinemas, Akinwumi Adesokan’s Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, Olivier Barlet’s Les cinemas d’Afrique des années 2000, and Sada Niang’s Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations.3 The contribution of Barlet, the French critic and director of the journal Africultures, is particularly noteworthy: a continuation of his pioneering Decolonizing the Gaze, it is a comprehensive encyclopedia of films from Africa and the African diaspora [End Page 155] from the first decade of the twenty-first century as well as a humanistic study of the growing cinematic production from South Africa to Morocco, including young directors whose work spans multiple continents. In contrast, the remainder of the aforementioned works share the common trait of presenting themselves as exhaustive readings of Africa’s cinemas while focusing their analyses on a narrow group of directors and works in the search for new critical and theoretical frameworks. A contrast is to be noted here. On the one hand, the objects of study themselves have changed radically in terms of style, form, genre, and production methods; there has been the explosion of digital, the financing of the Nollywood video industry in Nigeria, and the work of a younger generation of directors in the diaspora who have moved from a cinema of opposition—politically committed, characterized by grand auteurs—to a popular model centered on minor genres. Their work is anchored in a commercial or entertainment model less dependent on the specialized cinema festivals to which so much of Africa’s output had been previously confined. On the other hand, the attempted revision of African cinema studies—the effort to employ diverse standpoints and methodologies and to retreat from anthropological, ethnographic, and literary approaches in order to achieve recognition within the broader field of cinema studies—has yet to achieve its desired success.

Kenneth W. Harrow, professor of English at Michigan State University, invokes the authority of a timeworn panoply of thinkers well known to the reader from his previous works: Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Robert Stam, Dipesh Chakrabarty, James Ferguson, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. One novelty is the inclusion of a group of specialists in “garbology,” a field in which the concept of trash as a metaphor allegedly works from below to affirm the destabilizing aesthetic of African cinemas as derived from the system of global consumerism. Harrow claims that, from Sembène to Nollywood, the déchets humains (human debris) have been overlooked and the time has come for critics to engage with them. This singular approach, at once disruptive and humanistic, sets him on the hunt for images and forms of “trash” that aid in understanding the economic, sociopolitical, historical, cultural, and ecological situation of Africa in the world.

Throughout its twelve chapters, Harrow’s oppositional spirit and his...

pdf

Share