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The Chimalpahin Conference 2007: Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness October 16 - 18, 200 7
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So What if I Like Cinderella? African Film Forgets to be ‘Authentic’ Department of Cultural Studies University of Hawai'i at Manoa In response to the Self/Other binary perpetuated by colonialism, imperialism, and continued global power imbalances, African Cinema has written back to Western cinema with its own socio-politically heavy and oral narrativity-inflected style. Western critics and academics have acknowledged and acclaimed these productions as innovative and contestatory. However, the effort to re-write Western film through authentic African eyes arises from a tradition of negritude and pan-Africanism that reinforces the Self/Other binary and parochialisms of imperialism that the movement claims to challenge. By explicitly re-writing Western cinema, African cinema posits the former as colonial and therefore wrong, and then seeks to express authentic African culture rooted in a static past instead – both of which emphasize totalizing binaries. Additionally, the socio-political critiques within these films end up ironically self-defeating because the productions employ the Western-developed and popularized cinematic medium and aim the films at a primarily Western(ized) and privileged audience. I offer the Nigerian and Ghanaian video film phenomena as an alternative form of contestation. A locally self-sustaining and popular form, video films technologically, formally and thematically embrace the creolization arising from the hybrid contact zone. They include various degrees of Western and local inflection. However, the films’ creolization does not prevent them from being thoroughly located and relevant. By being directed at local audiences, these creolized re-writings avoid enforcing an abstract Us/The West binary, an iteration of the Self/Other binary. These films further blur boundaries by employing Western and local forms according to whatever will most appropriately reflect current local experiences and concerns. I discuss two such productions, Mummy’s Daughter and Thunderbolt Magun, which employ the Western romance genre, the Cinderella story and Shakespeare’s Othello. The two films weave Western texts into their narratives about heroic female protagonists who negotiate locally relevant issues like polygamy and AIDS. Through the re-writing that these films engage in, the binary oppositions that Cinderella enforces and Othello highlights are upset thematically, and through the video films’ creolized form, African Cinematic reinforcements of the Self/Other binary crumble.
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