African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen (review)

African filmmakers currently produce more films than their North American or European counterparts, yet the common misconception endures that the diversity of African cinema can be reduced to a simple, monolithic category of "African film." Sometimes "African film" is considered only in terms of anthropological films, imagined to represent some mythical "authenticity." At other times "African film" is considered as a set of artistic practices specific to the continent (sometimes derived from the model of Ousmane Sembène's early work). Misconceptions about a monolithic "African literature" are no less prevalent, as evident in anthologies of world literature in which a single African poem or story might stand in for a multitude of storytelling practices. Compounding the damaging effects of these misunderstandings about African cinema and literature is a common media prejudice that the entire continent can be portrayed in screen portrayals of violence.

Lindiwe Dovey's examination of the adaptation of literary works to film in South Africa and in Francophone West Africa attempts to complicate such misunderstandings about African cinemas and literatures. She has two goals: to historicize contemporary violence, and to situate postapartheid South Africa in relation to postindependence Francophone West Africa. Drawing on work by Frank Ukadike, Olivier Barlet, and Manthia Diawara on African cinema, Dovey looks at filmmakers who move away from concerns with Africa's victimization by European colonialism to address contemporary perceptions of the failures of the postcolonial state. As a key element in those failures, intrastate violence—more common than interstate violence—is the issue that most attracts Dovey's attention.

The book's main argument is that through performance, a critique of contemporary and historical violence emerges from the screen adaptations of literary works, whether African or European. But some serious problems arise from this formulation. First, because many Africans are nonliterate, they have not read the original literary works adapted to the screen. Second, many of the African films discussed in this book are rarely screened in Africa, so many Africans are not exposed to their critique of contemporary situations. Nonetheless, Dovey proposes that the mimetic representation offered by film restores the rationality and dignity of the victims of colonialism, "imply[ing] a process of healing, of overcoming the fracturing of selves, of mind from body" caused by the colonizers (25). Unlike the sensationalized violence in the Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong films historically projected in Africa, African filmmakers, according to Dovey, intentionally mobilize representations of violence for "educational reasons" (32). Violence is neither denied nor celebrated; instead, the adaptation of literary violence to the screen serves as a critique of this violence.

The above argument informs her analysis of individual films. Her analysis of Mickey Madoda Dube's A Walk in the Night (1998), for example, explores postapartheid anachronisms, arguing that the use of racist terms typical of apartheid South Africa (but now punishable as hate speech) serves as a reminder of apartheid's legacies and as a warning for South Africans to remain alert to ongoing racism. (For her, the xenophobic riots and murders in 2008 only confirmed that call to diligence.) In another case, Dovey argues that Cheik Oumar Sissoko's La Genèse (1999) "responds not only to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, but also to the ethnic cleans-ings in the former Yugoslavia" (255). She thus suggests that the film participates with other African screen adaptations of European literary works in eroding the "boundaries between African and non-African epistemologies, allowing them to inflect and influence each other" (274). Indeed, she goes further, evoking Clyde Taylor's suggestion that Afrocentric perspectives on violence might correct enlightenment discourses, thus allowing Europeans to understand the explosion of interethnic and xenophobic violence on their own continent during the 1990s.

Dovey's book includes insightful readings of individual films. Its theoretical conception, however, is marred somewhat by its thesis-like review of the scholarly literature...