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Harrow2016 - African Women in Cinematic Shift
Harrow2016 - African Women in Cinematic Shift
KENNETH W. HARROW
Michigan State University
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
There have been dramatic changes in depictions of women from the feminist perspec- digital
tives in the first decades of postcolonial sub-Saharan African celluloid cinema Nollywood
(1960s–80s), to women in a global digital era (1990s–present). A classic example of Fespaco
African celluloid cinema, its style and political gravitas, can be seen in Jean-Marie feminism
Teno’s latest film, Une feuille dans le vent (2013). Though it appeared in the digi- dispossession
tal period, and may technically be digital, stylistically and thematically it bears all genre
the hallmarks of ‘FESPACO cinema’. Conversely, the work of Tunde Kelani, one
of the stalwarts of Nollywood video film, falls under the rubric of ‘African video
film’, often dubbed ‘Nollywood’. To understand what the shift from ‘serious African
cinema’ to Nollywood has meant for women and feminism in African cinema, I will
elaborate on Butler and Athanasiou’s notion of dispossession in considering Teno’s
‘celluloid’ Feuille and Frank Arase’s digital Beyonce (2006). I hope to bridge issues
of early African feminism that focused on representation to those now framed in
terms of genre cinema.
There have been dramatic changes in depictions of women from the feminist
perspectives in the first decades of postcolonial sub-Saharan African celluloid
cinema (1960s−80s), to women in a global digital era (1990s−present). These
two regimes now sit side by side. Jean-Marie Teno’s latest film, Une feuille
233
Kenneth W. Harrow
1. Other important dans le vent (2013), shot on a DVCAM well into the digital period, may tech-
scholars writing about
video films include
nically be digital, but stylistically and thematically, it bears all the hallmarks
Jonathan Haynes, of what has been known as ‘African cinema’. Tunde Kelani, one of the stal-
Onookome Okome, warts of Nollywood video film, prefers to be known as an African film director
Brian Larkin, Matthew
Krings, John McCain, rather than as a Nollywood director. In fact, the conventional understanding
Alexander Jedlowski of ‘African cinema’, variously given as ‘African celluloid film’, ‘serious African
and many others. film’, ‘traditional African film’, or even ‘FESPACO film’ (Festival Panafricain
Garritano points
to the subtleties of du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou) has been contrasted with
terminology in her ‘African video film’, a designation now commonly given as ‘African popular
introduction:
video’ (see Garritano [2013]1) ‘African digital film’, ‘commercial African film’,
I use of the term and especially ‘Nollywood’.2 Although technological developments have been
‘video movie’
instead of the
central in creating the possibility for video films to be made, and for the digital
more common Nollywood industry to be born, these cannot account for Nollywood’s enor-
‘video film’ in a mous popularity. To understand that shift, and the role women have played
minor attempt
to acknowledge in it, I will first elaborate on the ‘celluloid’ tradition and the digital revolution,
the singular and then use Butler and Athanasiou’s notion of dispossession in considering
importance of Teno’s ‘celluloid’ filmwork, and then turn to the digital revolution, focusing
video technology
to the history of on Frank Arase’s Beyonce (2006). My purpose here is not to focus on how
African popular women directors have shaped the representation of gender, but to consider
video, which
to my mind is
two emblematic figures working in the different registers of celluloid and
diminished by video African cinema.
‘video film.’ … ‘Video
movie’ retains
an emphasis on
video as a medium ‘CELLULOID’: THE REGIME OF ‘FESPACO’ FILMMAKING
that generates Teno’s career began in 1983, and his films include Afrique, je te plumerai
particular material
conditions at the (Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1992) and The Colonial Misunderstanding (2004). He
level of the artifact, has long been considered one of Africa’s foremost documentary filmmak-
and it more
broadly highlights
ers. The early work, including Afrique, je te plumerai, Chef! (Chief!) (1999) and
video as a form Clando (Clandestine, 1996), were heavily invested in countering neocoloni-
of technological alism and colonial discourses. That work culminated in his Malentendu colo-
mediation and
commodification nial (The Colonial Misunderstanding) (2004) in which he takes us back to the
that is different German missionary implantation in Namibia a century earlier, at the time
from film. … Finally, of the slaughter of the Herero. His practice has been to insert himself into
‘movie’ calls up
very different the film as narrator and reporter, Here he registers the current viewpoints of
connotations than contemporary German missionaries at the time of the centenary marking the
‘film.’ Movies are
associated with
past genocide.
the commoditized With Lieux saints (Sacred Places) (2009) he takes a less polemical, more
forms of screen personal approach, exploring the conditions of exhibition of African cinema in
media produced
by dominant Ouagadougou (shot at the time of FESPACO) in a popular quartier of the city.
commercial His allegorization of artistic creativity, using the figure of a djembe maker,
industries, like rises to lyrical heights. The ‘sacred place’ referenced in the title is a local bar
Hollywood.
(2013: 23) which shows films − mostly western − to the neighbourhood locals. Teno sets
about an ‘investigation’ of why this is the case and what it would take for
2. ‘Nollywood’ here is
used not simply to African films to be shown.
denote Nigerian video His most recent, Une feuille dans le vent (A Leaf in the Wind) (2013) focuses
films, but the larger
body of ‘video’ films
on Ernestine Ouandié, the daughter of a well-known Cameroonian revolution-
(i.e. now digital) being ary leader. Ernestine’s hardships and death were marked by trauma. Although
produced in many Teno’s personal voice and style are recognizable, the film is based upon a single
parts of the continent.
Their designations long interview in which Teno’s recording of Ernestine’s life story emphasizes
might vary, from issues of the abuse African women have long experienced. The film highlights
Ghannywood to women’s vulnerability to abusive relations of power. Her life was marked by
Kannywood, from
Kenya to Tanzania and precarity, her fate that of the dispossessed (cf. Butler and Athanasiou 2013).
More significantly, Une feuille dans le vent represents the continuum of a beyond, but the general
traits are comprised
tradition of African film originally associated with the ideologically inflected of commercial film
films of Ousmane Sembène and others of the late 1960s and 1970s, whose attributes, and contrast
adherence to the underlying principles of Third Cinema created an agenda with the older celluloid
traditions that by and
marked by a vocabulary of national independence and, concomitantly, female large saw themselves
emancipation. The vehicle for delivering the message was celluloid cinema more as defined as
(especially the films of Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Cheick Oumar politically committed
filmmaking. Their
Sissoko, Mahama Johnson Traore, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Sarah Maldoror, Jean- genres are ‘popular’ as
Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, Gaston Kabore and Safi Faye) that had the follow- opposed to ‘serious’.
This is changing
ing traits: they were ‘well-made films’: their plots were linear, culminating rapidly, but the broad
in resolutions that enlightened the viewers about ‘the truth’; they were social tendency has been
realist; their protagonists were generally made comprehensible in terms of driven by commercial
considerations more
their historical and social context, both of which conveyed the films’ ideol- than ideological ones.
ogy symbolically and symptomatically. In film studies terms, they exemplified
Third Cinema as semiotic vehicles available for hermeneutic analysis. In short,
they were made to order for a certain African feminism, one in which female
struggle and emancipation would be the by-words.
The project of struggle, emancipation and national liberation marked the
films defined as Third Cinema. Their initial inspiration arose from the revolu-
tionary manifestoes and practices of the Latin American cineastes, Ferdinand
Solanas, Octavio Getino, Humberto Solas, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Glauber
Rocha and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Getino and Solanas’s Hour of the Furnaces
(1968) exemplified the revolutionary and experimental style espoused by the
young filmmakers whose resistance to imperialism and colonialism carried
over to the rejection of mainstream, commercial cinema that was dominated
by Hollywood. Their styles and approaches varied, but class-based, dialectical
ideological formulations defined their conception of ‘lucidity’, the comprehen-
sion of capitalism and its political institutions, and praxis, in which filmmaking
and exhibition were considered tools in the struggle. Early African filmmak-
ers like Sembène, Cissé and later Abderrahmane turned to The Soviet Union
for their training, which was more classically framed as socialist realism.
Although they were influenced by Third Cinema, their styles were less coun-
ter-cultural (as with Espinosa’s ‘Imperfect Cinema’), and more classic oppo-
sitional cinema. The formulations of African and Latin American filmmakers
inspired the studies of Teshome Gabriel (Third Cinema in the Third World: The
Aesthetics of Liberation [1982]), Keyan Tomaselli (The Cinema of Apartheid: Race
and Class in South African Film [1989]), and Férid Boughedir (Le cinéma africain
de A à Z [1987]), who set the agendas for a political, engage practice of film-
making. If women were represented in the early films of this period, it was
as figures whose struggle was subordinated to the larger goals of achieving
national liberation or combatting neocolonialism (cf. Sembène’s La Noire de…
[Black Girl] [1966]). The portrayal of women whose own gender based strug-
gles were of concern only emerged after the primary goals of national libera-
tion were accomplished (cf. Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga [1972]). Eventually
women directors were to change this primary orientation.
In these early years of African filmmaking, dominated by male direc-
tors, women were often, if not always, portrayed as victims, oppressed, weak
or dominated. But the turn to realism, under the banner of Third Cinema,
generated a prevailing pattern in which most narratives either conveyed a
sense of woman as victim (classically as in Sembène’s La Noire de… or Tauw
[1970], or Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa’s Muno Moto [1975] and Le Prix de la
liberté [1978]), or, conversely, confirmed the same framing of the issue by
www.intellectbooks.com 235
Kenneth W. Harrow
3. For example, see the portraying revolutionary women as exceptional (see Rama in Xala [1974] or
novels of Mariama
Ba, especially Une si
the princess in Ceddo [1976], or Med Hondo’s 1986 Sarraounia). The revolu-
longue lettre (1980), as tionary camera, for Third Cinema, especially in Latin America was described
well as those of Buchi famously by Solanas and Getino in 1969 as a gun that could shoot 24 frames
Emecheta and Flora
Nwapa, all of whom per second (Solanas and Getino 1997). It was as intended to enable the audi-
sought to exemplify the ence to perceive the causes of capitalist and imperialist oppression, i.e., to
notion of a liberated achieve ‘lucidity’, this a favoured term of the time. Feminist concerns were
and modern African
woman whose struggle not always central for this cinema. However, in African cinema of the 1960s
was often against and 1970s the liberation of the African woman from oppressive patriarchal
patriarchy.
systems recurred as a general theme, in line with the contemporary notions
4. In his study of of women’s emancipation (Boyce-Davies and Graves Ngambika [1986]). This
the history of
African cinema,
‘first-wave’ of feminist activism raised the question of the ‘New African
Manthia Diawara Woman’ lifting the barriers of women entering into ‘modernity’ alongside the
(1992) delineates African man.3 If the revolutionary struggle in Africa was to become free from
the creation of a
federation of African European colonial domination, this feminist agenda represented a subse-
filmmakers (FEPACI) quent stage where liberation now had to take into account issues of gender.
whose progressive, This tension between what was becoming a feminist agenda and the national
revolutionary goals
included the fight for liberation could be seen as early as the 1950s and early 1960s in the works of
independence and Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth [Originally published in 1961; 1965]
the emancipation
of African cinema
and Studies in a Dying Colonialism [1965] − especially the chapter ‘Algeria
itself so that it could unveiled’). Fanon called for a revolution that prioritized national liberation,
serve as a tool for the and that call was echoed in the dominant strains of Third World politics. At
liberated nations. The
reigning notions of the same time, it was not possible to ignore the correlations between patri-
Third World liberation archal domination and colonial oppression. When the latter was ended,
were ideological as the former became increasingly important, as could be seen in the films of
well as cultural. FEPACI
was created in 1969 Sembène and the novels and films of Assia Djebar.
following the first Teno’s film on Ernestine Ouandié shows that this heritage continues
World Festival of Black
Arts.
into the present, that ‘celluloid’, like ‘FESPACO’, signifies a lineage of works
grounded in anticolonial struggles for independence, against neocolonialism
5. Boyce Davies cites
Filomina Steady in
and for the liberation of women from both African patriarchy and western
her identification Imperialism.4
of African feminist Sembène Ousmane and his generation of filmmakers were known for
issues as including
‘female autonomy having taken up these issues. Yet the language that conveys this familiar
and cooperation; an message is not only that of the ‘father of African cinema’ (a title often reserved
emphasis on nature for Sembène), but of the entire generation whose day has long since passed.
over culture; the
centrality of children, The classics concerned with ‘women’s liberation’ include Sembène’s La noire
multiple mothering de… (1966) and Xala (1975), Cissé’s Den Muso (1975), Dikongué-Pipa’s Muna
and kinship; the use
of ridicule in African
Moto (1975) and Le Prix de l’Indépendence (1978); Safi Faye’s Lettre Paysanne
women’s worldview’ (1975); Sissoko’s Finzan (1990) and Ouédraogo’s Yaaba (1989). The issues
(Davies and Graves these films often raised conform to what might best be called stage one African
1986: 6). Boyce
Davies then goes feminism (see Boyce and Graves 19865), with dramas created around forced
on to delineate the or polygamous marriages, the conflict between ‘modern’ romance and ‘tradi-
‘inequities’ to which tional’ marriage arrangements, patriarchal oppression of wives and daugh-
African women were
subject, and I believe ters, excision and the exclusion of marginalized widows or single women who
this list actually were often attacked as ‘witches’ ((Sissoko’s Finzan [1989]), Kaboré’s Wend
corresponded to what
most novels and films
Kuuni [1983], Ouédraogo’s Yaaba [1989] − cf. Nnaemeka 1997; Harrow 2002).
were addressing: These issues arise out of a notion of tradition often set in conflict with
‘lack of choice in the ideal of the ‘modern’ African woman − women who would acquire west-
motherhood and
marriage, oppression of ern education, enter into the colonial economy, speak European languages,
barren women, genital shake off old patriarchal traditions, end polygamy and become the equal of
mutilation, enforced their husbands. When male filmmakers represented the ‘women’s condition’,
silence and a variety
it was to show how women were oppressed and needed to become ‘modern’.
However, when women were the directors, the female characters were often of other forms of
oppression intrinsic to
more empowered (one thinks of Safi Faye’s Lettre paysanne [1975], or Mossane various societies which
[1996]; Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga [1972]; Fanta Nacro’s short films [espe- still plague African
cially Puk Nini, 1996], and The Night of Truth [2004]). The great marker of women’s lives…’ (Davies
and Graves 1986: 7).
the shift in this tendency can be seen in Sembène’s own work. In Faat Kine
(Sembène, 2000) the protagonist Kine is a middle-aged mother and success-
ful business woman who owns and runs a gas station. She is portrayed as
powerful and assertive, and dominates the men in her life. In contrast, when
she was a young, she was abused by her teacher, beaten and cast out by her
father, and cheated by her lover. Sembène uses her story to signal the change
in women’s roles; in the process he enacts the change in representation of
African women within the modern economy.
www.intellectbooks.com 237
Kenneth W. Harrow
patriarchal oppression that provides the context for revolt. With Faat Kine
(2000) that all changes, and although men’s power remains contested in
Moolaade (Sembène, 2004), women are no longer peripheral to the action.
Until Nollywood, most African cinema could be read through these lenses,
with an older notion of feminism (I once referred to this as ‘the feminism of the
old man’ − Harrow [2010]), than what now marks the new millennium. In the
1990s Fanto Nacro changed the scenario somewhat by highlighting women’s
perspectives. In her early short films, there is a strong pedagogical func-
tion (Femmes capables [1993], and especially Le truc de Konaté [Nacro, 1998],
which deals with women’s insistence on the need for men to use condoms
in an age of AIDS). With Puk Nini (1995) she redefines the power relations
between men and women to hilarious effect. Salif, a dentist, cheats on his
wife when a beautiful Senegalese prostitute, Astou, comes to Ouagadougou.
But when Salif’s wife Isa combines forces with Astou, the conventional narra-
tive is turned inside out, and the women ultimately humiliate Salif. More
significantly, this plot turns on the images of Salif and Isa as the ‘modern’
urban couple, both of whom work as professionals. Their child’s education is
stressed, and their technological engagement with modernity is highlighted
by their buying appliances and using the VCR to show their daughter clips of
their wedding. Nacro is committed to the ‘New African Woman’ motif, but
without sentimentalizing or idealizing it.
Her most ambitious film, La Nuit de la vérité (2005), shot in the aftermath
of Rwanda, is much darker, as she addresses the violent conflicts of contem-
porary times. Still insisting upon a pedagogical function, she portrays how
women were victims of war, driven insane by the violence, and yet collectively
able to overcome the traumas visited upon them by war that turned men, and
occasionally also women, into monsters.
2000), or betrayers corrupted by the desire for wealth (Osuofia in London 6. Although Ghanaian and
Nigerian video films
[Ogoro, 2003]). They are too close to power and luxuriate in the objects had been made before
money provides (Beyonce, 2006), but also inspire men to turn from evil to good Living in Bondage,
(Abeni [Kelani, 2006]). They animate the regime of affect in melodramatic it was by far the
most successful, the
situations (Abeni, Figurine [Afolayan, 2009]), and provide the excitement in most professionally
modernity’s clothes (Figurine, Phone Swap [Afolayan, 2012]). In short, having produced and acted
been objects of men’s sympathy and understanding in the celluloid era, they film up to that point.
Haynes (2016) provides
have become movers and shakers in the digital. Even as their image as sexual details on the film’s
objects has been highlighted, they have acquired agency, albeit in a tinsel genesis and important
impact on subsequent
world of commerce and gilded palaces. filmmaking practices.
There are limits to these broad generalizations about the difference Although I list Nnebue
between ‘celluloid film’ and ‘video movies’. Despite being ‘celluloid’ Faat Kine as the ‘author’ of this
film, it was actually
moves us closer to melodrama’s structures and affects; conversely Kelani’s directed by Chris Obi
latest film on sickle cell (Dazzling Mirage [Kelani, 2014]) aims to provide the Rapu. Nnebue wrote
entertainment features of Nollywood with a heavier emphasis on pedagogi- and financed the film,
and basically oversaw
cal function − as was also the case of Thunderbolt (2001, the first Nollywood the production.
film distributed in the United States). Melodrama and pop cinema features
were also exhibited in films derived from the ‘celluloid’ tradition of higher
quality, intellectually challenging works. For example, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les
Saignantes (Bekolo, 2005) is set in Cameroon in 2025, and brought to a climax
his hip hop futuristic jump-cutting style, first exhibited in Quartier Mozart
(Bekolo, 1992). The film centres on young women who are ‘saignantes’ −
sexy, ultra brash in their language, and mentally and physically powerful. Les
Saignantes attempts to break with conventional male narratives that entailed
sons vying fathers. Nonetheless, despite its neo-noir stylistics, it remained
within the regime of serious celluloid cinema.
Nollywood represents a real break with celluloid filmmaking. The digital
wave, beginning with video filmmaking in the late 1980s and turning digi-
tal by the 1990s, conformed to the principles of neo-liberalism in represent-
ing a world devoted to consumerism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Harvey
2005). Even when the resolution of the film entailed punishment for those
who sold their own relatives, and souls, for money (as in the ‘first’ important
Nollywood film, Kenneth Nnuebe’s 1992 Living in Bondage6), the Pentecostal
moralism barely covered the visual pleasures of representing wealth, along
with erotic, powerful, transgressive and above all beautiful women − women
played by actresses now part of a larger star system (Tsika 2015). Nollywood
set out not only to create commercially successful films but also an indus-
try, something the celluloid films never were able to accomplish. To do so it
had to reconfigure the way that women were represented in the service of
consumerist desire. Issues of gender were not incidental, but central to the
question of what kind of films would sell. As Garritano (2013) put it, ‘African
popular culture [is] a gender apparatus, a technology that produces and natu-
ralizes particular gender ideologies. Gender is not incidental or supplemen-
tal to the worlds and identities imagined in the videos, but necessary to the
articulation of these identities’ (17−18).
Setting Teno’s Une feuille dans le vent over against such Nollywood block-
busters as Jénífà, Jezebell or Beyonce enables us to see how these two divergent
approaches to gender and cinema have always also depended upon funda-
mentally different representations of women. In the former, subjectivity and
identity are foregrounded; in the latter, desire and material values prevail.
In celluloid films, women come to subjectivity through complicated mecha-
nisms of submission and revolt; in Nollywood, even as women themselves are
www.intellectbooks.com 239
Kenneth W. Harrow
7. The phrase ‘Africa’s objects of consumption, they are also consumers. In the former, the roles of
night school’ has been
widely attributed
women are debated in terms of a feminist agenda; in the latter, the dominant
to Sembène, and is ideological framing of gender is always already assumed and normalized. If
quoted by Samba it is challenged, then it is so as to return us to conventional assumptions. If
Gadjigo in his California
Newsreel description the challenge becomes too subversive, we move in the direction of ‘serious’
of his film on cinemas that call into question the framing of norms. The films that ‘cellu-
Sembène, http://www. loid’ women filmmakers have tended to make reconfigure how subjectivity
newsreel.org/articles/
ousmanesembene.htm. is formed, whereas the pressures of commercial cinema have turned more
in the direction of narrative and visual pleasures honed over the decades by
Hollywood genres (Mulvey 1975; De Lauretis 1984).
The dominant modes that conveyed this conflicting set of worlds originally
were social realism versus melodrama, now reflected across popular genres
from crime thrillers to occult dramas (Haynes 2000). For Sembène’s gener-
ation the goals were ‘serious’ −’raising consciousness’ in what he famously
termed ‘Africa’s night school’.7 For Nollywood, it entailed the need to real-
ize a profit at all costs. The two trends in cinema produce radically different
representations of women that call up Butler and Athanasiou’s (2013) concept
of dispossession, which is built around notions of the subject and of material
loss, the two facets of celluloid and digital cinema that bear most directly on
the question of female representation.
www.intellectbooks.com 241
Kenneth W. Harrow
DISPOSSESSION IN NOLLYWOOD
In the familiar context of colonialism, we expect the colonized to have lost
their land, autonomy, agency and even family members and lives. The past
mechanisms of conquest are repeated in the current age of globalization and
neo-liberalism, and thus evoke the second definition of dispossession. Here
persons are ‘disowned and abjected’ by ‘normalizing powers’ that ‘regulate
the distribution of vulnerability’. This involves:
www.intellectbooks.com 243
Kenneth W. Harrow
8. ‘A result is that African ‘pact with the devil’ by agreeing to Susu’s promises of wealth. Nana Ekuahe
film criticism has no
real model for dealing
is seduced into a lesbian relationship, abandons her responsibilities to her
with a mass, national husband, and turns from frowsy housewife to ‘sex bomb’. In the process
phenomenon, whose she becomes a devotee of ‘Jezebell’, the classic figure of dangerous female
claims on scholarly
attention are perhaps power, rising out of the ocean, with her light skin, green eyes, long hair and
more sociological evil mysterious powers to bestow wealth at the price of motherhood. Safo’s
than political or purely Jezebell skirts on the edges of self-parody in this revision of the familiar warn-
aesthetic’ (Haynes
2000: 10). ings against the liberated woman − her unmitigated glee, exuberance and
[T]o understand enjoyment of power and wealth undermine the moral codes intended to be
its [Nollywood’s]
structures and
set in place with the film’s denouement.
resources we need The unlimited power unleashed by esoteric forces turns the norms that
something like frame gender possibilities into mirrors of the helplessness of the social order
an ethnographic
description of to control such figures as ‘the President’ or his daughter with all her guards,
the entire media cars and wealth. Even Beyonce’s over-the-top ending merely confirms the
environment, focusing vision of a world where struggling against dispossession has lost any reason-
on media consumption
as well as the able possibility. The melodramas impose a new set of questions for women
methods of video film that arise only within a melodramatic framing: Why cannot Raj marry Ciera,
production, which do
not much resemble
in Beyonce, but is continually frustrated in his attempts to forge a relationship
those of the rest of with the woman he loves? Why does Beyonce always succeed in defeating
African cinema. The the couple Ray-Ciera, in killing Ciera, in forcing Raj to marry her, when in
literature on African
cinema has in general scene after scene Raj demonstrates his love for Ciera and dislike of Beyonce?
not taken on these These theatrical questions arise in the viewer’s resistance to the disman-
broader tasks (Haynes tling of all social norms except those marked by extravagance and the spec-
2000: 12−13).
‘Fortunately, tacles of consumerist, millennial capitalism. The excess and materialism of
another, possibly more Nollywood has displaced the viewer’s expectations of scenes in which subjec-
useful paradigm is
at hand: that of the
tivity might be tamed by the encounter with social norms, or embraced by
African popular arts, shared emotional charges. Assujetissement has surrendered in the wild maze of
or more generally dispossession as the display of wealth sweeps all in its path.
African popular culture’
(Haynes 2000: 13). The trajectory that led from celluloid liberation to digital exhilaration has
been marked by new representations of women now given in terms of excess
and fantasy, rather than realism or liberation. The new age is moving swiftly
along tracks driven more and more by the economics of a burgeoning film
industry, even as the older concepts of filmmaking continue to provide us
with such poignant and compelling portraits as that of Ernestine Ouandié.
Though we might want to attribute the changes to neo-liberal dictates,
in Garritano’s words, African popular digital film must be understood as
‘a technology that produces and naturalizes particular gender ideologies.
Gender is not incidental or supplemental to the worlds and identities imag-
ined in the videos’ (Garritano 2013: 17). Gender was once crucial to the
framing of ‘Third World’ perspectives at the beginning of African cinema. In
moving from ‘cinema’ to ‘film’ to the ‘movies’, from celluloid to the digital,
the norms of gender performances have been simultaneously marked by a
new grammar of the political that would seem to be distant from its libera-
tionist beginnings.
CONCLUSION
Along with that change in gender representation has come the shift in theo-
rizing cinema − the enormous shift once predicted by Jonathan Haynes
with his groundbreaking approach to Nollywood (2000)8 where he called
for attention to the cultural and material rather than the ideological or
psychological. The swing has taken us away from the dominance of Mulvey
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Kenneth W. Harrow
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Harrow, K. W. (2016), ‘Women in “African cinema” and “Nollywood films”:
A shift in cinematic regimes’, Journal of African Cinemas, 8: 3, pp. 233–48,
doi: 10.1386/jac.8.3.233_1
www.intellectbooks.com 247
Kenneth W. Harrow
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Kenneth Harrow is distinguished professor of English at Michigan State
University. His work focuses on African cinema and literature, diaspora and
postcolonial studies. His latest work is Rethinking African Cultural Production,
co-edited with Frieda Ekotto. He is also the author of Trash! African
Cinema From Below; Postcolonial African Cinema: from Political Engagement
to Postmodernism; Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African
Women’s Writing; and Thresholds of Change in African Literature. Prof. Harrow
has also edited African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings, and a special
issue of Matatu on women in African literature and cinema.
Contact: Dept of English and Film Studies, Michigan State University, 619
Red Cedar Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
E-mail: harrow@msu.edu
Kenneth W. Harrow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.