Editor’s Notes

With this issue Black Camera completes its fifth year of publication—a defining marker and gauge—and with ten distinctive issues behind us, we now look forward to the next five years confident of the importance of our endeavor. No less significant, Black Camera has found its niche among scholarly film journals, documenting the understudied and shared histories of black filmmaking in the world as a cultural practice, historical activity, and narrative and visual art form. As enunciated in the editor’s notes of the first issue of Black Camera,

Our project is to document, encourage, and invigorate research . . . engage in conversation with other cinematic traditions, movements, and practices in world cinema; stimulate new, and refresh traditional, theoretical and analytical perspectives; privilege the study of “new forms of cinematic practice”; disseminate research to enhance the teaching of black film; serve as a repository and showcase for black artistic and intellectual achievement; and constitute a forum to debate and challenge received and ensconced views and assumptions about filmmaking practices in the African diaspora, where new, evolving, and longstanding cinematic formations and traditions are in play.

These objectives frame the work ahead, as well as the thematic concerns of filmmakers, who, under the de-territorializing processes of globalization, endeavor to make sense of the world.

The fifth installment of Close-Up featured in this issue is guest edited by Carmela Garritano and devoted to Nollywood—that constellation of films from Nigeria that evolved in the past two decades to become the second largest producer of cinema in the world. Garritano’s innovative focus here is on Nollywood as “an ever-expanding and extraordinarily heterogeneous archive of Africa’s engagement with the world,” and to that end she has commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field, among them Jonathan Haynes, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Akin Adesokan, Jane Bryce, and Kenneth W. Harrow. Together, the essays situate and theorize Nollywood within a transnational optic, suggesting, in Garritano’s phrasing, its “worldliness.”

Speaking of Close-Ups, we call attention and invite contributions to the provocative subject of “Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination,” guest edited by James Ford, who asserts that “fugitivity entails a critique of violence, engaging the forces sustaining, resisting, or overturning the status quo, and imagining a free state, not as the time before captivity but as an anticipated future still to be enacted.” Other Close-Ups are in the works on postcolonial filmmaking in French-speaking countries, John Akomfrah and The Black Audio Film Collective, and the controversial Django Unchained (2012).

This issue of Black Camera also includes compelling essays by Melissa Thackway, on sub-Saharan Francophone filmmaking, and Karen M. Bowdre, on passing films and racial equality. For our regularly featured Africultures Dossier, Olivier Barlet contributes two pieces of interest—an “Africultures Manifesto” and an interview with Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu on homosexuality and homophobia in her film in progress, Jambula Tree. Rounding out the issue are reviews of two books, Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 and Black Power TV; a film review of Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 (2012); and an Archival Spotlight on preserving the documentary series Eyes on the Prize (1987–90).

On to the next five years with you, our readers.