South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centered Films by Litheko Modisane (review)

Drawing on films, interviews, reviews, audience research, and historical and contemporary scholarship on South African cinema, in South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centered Films Litheko Modisane seeks to understand how discourses around black identity in South Africa have been produced, negotiated, and contested through the different kinds of publics generated by the circulation of black-centered films. Modisane uses the term “black-centered” rather than black “because blackness is the subject of their focus, and not an a priori and hermetically sealed category” (3). Given the context of South Africa, where black subjects have been historically excluded from the imagination of the nation, and the fact that filmmaking and representations of black identity have being controlled by a white minority, defining black film and a black aesthetic is complicated and contradictory. Therefore, early “black-centered” films were produced and directed by European filmmakers. Modisane’s notion of “black-centered film” points to the complex history of filmmaking in South Africa, emphasizing the multiple negotiations over cinematic blackness and its relationship to the notion of the public sphere both during and after apartheid. This book analyzes films, and one television series, made between 1949 and 2004 and moves beyond the analysis of representations of blackness in the history of filmmaking in South Africa to focus on the circulation of films and the publics that are generated through their local and global, or national and transnational, movements. Modisane’s argument is straightforward: “Under certain evolving conditions and circumstances of their circulation, black-centered films stimulate public critical engagements on blackness” (2).

Theoretically, Modisane draws on Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere. According to Modisane, Habermas too easily dismisses the role of film in promoting and generating critical “political public debate” (9). Habermas locates his critique of a declining public sphere in the “shift from a culture-debating public to a culture-consuming one” (9). Modisane critiques Habermas’ marginalization of film and its relationship to the political by analyzing the manner in which black-centered films generated public debates and discussions about blackness in South Africa. In order to analyze these debates and discussions that discursively produced “critical engagements on blackness,” Modisane turns to secondary literature such as reviews in newspapers and magazines, public events, and the debates generated through the circulation of these films. Modisane’s book is structured around four films, Come Back, Africa (dir. Lionel Rogosin, 1959), uDeliwe (dir. Simon Sabela, 1975), Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz, 1988), and Fools (dir. Ramadan Suleman, 1998), which are considered canonical texts by film scholars of cinema in South Africa. In chapter 6, Modisane turns to Yizo Yizo (dir. Barry Berk, Andrew Dosunmu, Angus Gibson, and Teboho Mahlatsi, 2004), a popular and controversial television series produced by the South African Broadcasting Commission (SABC), under their mandate to educate and entertain.

In chapter 2, Modisane analyzes Come Back, Africa, directed by Rogoson as part of his trilogy on “racialism in the United States, South Africa, and Asia” (29). An experimental film, Come Back, Africa is an examination of “black urban life under apartheid” and examines the relationship between blackness and modernity in South Africa. This film, like Mapantsula, was made under clandestine conditions and was banned by the apartheid government. The apartheid government was invested in curtailing and limiting the formation of black publics with the aim of suppressing the formation of a politically conscious black population. Although the film was banned, it circulated internationally and returned to South Africa when apartheid ended. Come Back, Africa was intimately related to the Sophiatown intellectuals, Modisane, Nkosi, and Themba. Whilst all three acted in the film, Modisane and Nkosi also cowrote the script. The film was therefore aligned with Drum magazine’s objective of challenging, “official constructions of blackness and to create oppositional or counterimaginations of black identity” (33). In the late 1950s and early 1960s Come Back, Africa circulated in Europe...