Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 ed. by MaryEllen Higgins (review)

This collection of fifteen diverse essays on cinema about Africa chooses its beginning date of 1994 on the assumption that Nelson Mandela’s election and the Rwandan genocide mark a change in Hollywood’s treatment of Africa. Based largely on papers given at two 2007–2008 roundtables titled “What’s Wrong with Human Rights Films?,”¹ the anthology centers on critiques of such films, with contributions by Margaret Higonnet, MaryEllen Higgins, Joyce B. Ashuntantang, and others on films such as The Last King of Scotland (2006), Blood Diamond (2006), The Devil Came on Horseback (2007), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and The Constant Gardener (2005). The collection uses both the term Hollywood and its own announced chronological parameters more than flexibly: one of the collection’s best essays is Dayna Oscherwitz’s “Bye-Bye Hollywood: African Cinema and Its Double in Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa,” an extended reading of a film shot in Chad in 1991. Others deal with Nigerian Newton Aduaka’s FESPACO-winning child soldier fiction Ezra, South African Neil Blomkamp’s sci-fi District 9 (2009), and Red Dust (2004), based on Gillian Slovo’s South African novel.

“The Cited and the Uncited: Towards an Emancipatory Reading of Representations of Africa,” by Harry Garuba and Natasha Himmelman, very properly placed at the beginning of the volume, offers a meta-reflection on the processes of interpretation at stake in the whole book. Referring to Edward Said’s notion of citation and to V. Y. Mudimbe’s idea of the colonial archive in a wide-ranging article that also includes a very smart unpacking of The Last King of Scotland, Garuba and Himmelman argue that much of cinematic interpretation focuses “on retrieving the citations that enable and give authority to each frame, image, or sequence of the film . . . uncovering the circuits of citation—the process of iteration and reiteration—through which cultural meanings are created, disseminated, and consolidated or subverted” (16). Once the critic has done this, however, he or she still faces a binary choice, either to reaffirm the citation or to attempt to subvert it by reversing its meaning—a limiting dilemma familiar to many postcolonial critics, and perhaps even inherent in the foundations of their project. Garuba and Himmelman advocate a way out of this dilemma by attending carefully to the “uncited,” “images and sequences that stand outside this dominant system of citations.” The uncited, they argue, “is not dependent on the subversive, counterdiscursive move” (16–17). The “emancipation” offered by this essay is exciting, but it’s not completely clear whether the uncited will simply be recuperated into a newly emergent discourse, or whether it will continue to beckon in a kind of surrealist way, shimmering from the edges of meaning. I would welcome another essay that begins where this one concludes.

A few contributors to the volume briefly mention Haitian director Raoul Peck’s Rwanda film Sometimes in April (2005), which takes a very different approach than most human rights films, but there is unfortunately no essay explicitly devoted to it. Many contributors cite Mahmood Mamdani’s Rwanda book When Victims Become Killers and his Darfur volume Saviors and Survivors, but deeper engagement with Mamdani could perhaps have clarified how much of the trouble with human rights films is cinematic, and how much is due to problems inherent in Western human rights discourse itself.

What’s wrong with human rights film overlaps heavily with what has always been problematic about Hollywood representations of Africa: the insistence on a white focal character with whom (presumably) white audience members can “identify”; gross oversimplifications of histories and cultures; little or no reference to the role of the West in creating the problems human rights crusaders purport to solve; denial of agency to Africans; portrayal of Africans en masse rather than individually; unceasing reference to violence, darkness and chaos, etc. Recent human rights films perhaps give more space to serious black actors in major roles, and some of the films are more sophisticated: The Last King...