Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents

One of the major criticisms leveled against contemporary scholarship of "African" cinema¹ is that we place too much emphasis on the social, political, and economic difficulties faced by "African" filmmakers instead of engaging with theory, or, at least, establishing an indigenous theoretical framework within which we can redefine the aesthetic constructs and challenges that "African" filmmakers, film critics, and "Africanist'' teachers of "African" cinema need to grapple with in the twenty-first century. To my way of thinking, a thorough re-examination of scholarly strategies, one which conflates theoretical, discursive criticism with pragmatic, creative, intervention, is necessary if "African" cinema must outdo the present commercial mediocrity of Hollywood and make lasting contributions to world cinema and its filmic language in the same way that filmmakers from other cultures, such as China: Farewell, My Concubine (dir. Chen Kaige, 1993); Japan: Dreams (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990); New Zealand: Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994); and Canada: Atanarjuat / The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2000), have done from an unapologetically non-Western semiological perspective.²

In this article I want to examine some of the major "intellectual" problems faced by African cinema scholars, both on the continent and abroad, contextualize the enormity and complexity of any attempt to theorize African cinema, redefine the expression "theory" from an African semiological and epistemic perspective, and, most importantly, interrogate what the term "to theorize" means inside and outside the Western academy today. My primary intention in this whole undertaking is to reveal the political underpinnings of the term "to theorize," even when it is used innocuously as academic parlance to encourage greater dialogue between the Western academy and African intellectuals negotiating new and complex discourses about hybrid cultural artforms, such as the cinema.

The African Scholar Versus the Western Academy

One of the major reasons why the bulk of academic discourse on African, and, indeed, African diasporic cinematic practices, have remained largely "untheorized,"³ in a problematic sense of the word, despite a steady output of distinguished scholarship by Mbye Cham, Manthia Diawara, N. Frank Ukadike, Teshome Gabriel, Keyan Tomaselli, Clyde Taylor, among others,⁴ can perhaps be examined and understood in the following light: there is an absence of a coherent theoretical construct or infrastructure generated by African scholars within which African cinema can be studied, criticized, taught, or appreciated. By "theoretical infrastructure" I do not mean the superimposition or insertion of the cultural ideas and artistic philosophies of Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan, Derrida, and other European theorists on or into the study and analysis of African art-forms ranging from oral poetry through painting and sculpture, to the new wave of video filmmaking in the continent.⁵ I mean the establishment of a theorized vocabulary of experiencing and creating, of seeing and understanding, of appreciation and teaching, of exegesis and evaluation, that is "African" in origin and sensibility, yet captures within its operative dynamic the complex, hybridized, or syncretic nature of African political, historical, and cultural experience. This indigenized theoretical vocabulary need not ostracize the contributions of Western intellectuals with respect to the history of the arts, ideas, and theory; in fact, the vocabulary should incorporate these ideas and, where possible, subvert or disembowel⁶ them; neither does it have to get rid of the English language or French, the primary languages of communication between Africa and the rest of the Western world. What this new discourse that I am arguing for should do is to bring into the currency of international cinematic discourse, concepts, terminologies, philosophies, theories of art, and art appreciation that are indigenously and linguistically African or African-oriented. By this I mean that, we, African and "Africanist" scholars, should go forth and discover the precise vernacular vocabularies and registers in which specific African cultures have couched their theories of performance, the aesthetic concepts surrounding their artistic processes, and the creative philosophies that shape the production of their art-forms and deploy these, as full-bodied African expressions, in our academic discourse, whether we are writing in English, French, Portuguese, German, or Belgian languages.⁷ The reasons why we are not doing this...