Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2019

Using Amir Baraka's conception of Afrosurrealism as a black aesthetic form that is imbricated with 'lived life', this article proposes an Afrosur/realist reading of Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki ('The hyena's journey') (1973). I explore the trajectory of the iconic lovers Anta and Mory and their recourse to petty criminality as a means of escaping to Paris. I first consider how petty criminality or 'hustling' can be read in relation to Abdoumaliq Simone's notion of 'people as infrastructure' or a realistic reproduction of the African urban. I then turn my attention to Membéty's surrealist portrayal of Anta and Mory as 'hyenas' – or the archetypal figure of the stranger who poses a threat to the city's social order. Central to my analysis of the surreal as an expression of desire is the filmic reproduction of post-independence Dakar on-screen. I pay attention to place-identity, and the filmic depiction of nodes and modes of mobility as sites of potential disruption to the city as a form of social order. The article thus subverts and complicates the dichotomy between the real and the surreal as cinematic forms that reproduce the postcolonial African urban as both lived and imagined.

This article examines the 2015 art-film Necktie Youth (Sibs Shongwe-La Mer) with a view to understanding new affective, temporal and genre formations in post-transitional South Africa. A quasi-documentary portrait of ennui and depression among a circle of privileged 'born-free' youth in Johannesburg's wealthy suburbs, the film uses a coming-of-age narrative template to allegorize post-transitional South Africa. Yet this allegory is not a straightforward one of either disillusionment or progressivist maturation. Rather, it has something in common with David Scott's analysis of the 'ruined time' of post-revolution: an endless present haunted by the ghosts of futures past. I use Scott's lens to understand the floating, marooned temporalities of the film, whose deep melancholic undertow is at odds with its performance of youthful post-apartheid self-fashioning. Thus, despite its claims to inhabiting a 'new' historical phase, the film remains haunted by the ghosts of what Scott calls the 'allegory of emancipatory redemption'. I show how the film ultimately produces a sense of 'exile from history' – a mode in which key historical events have already happened and in effect overwhelm the present – and argue that this sensibility is key to understanding the contradictory temporalities of the present.

An explosion of creative practices in music, film and video production followed the liberalization of the Tanzanian media in the early 1990s. Concerned about cultural imperialism, Tanzania's first president Julius Nyerere had resisted allowing television in mainland Tanzania and consequently the first licence was only granted in 1994. Following the establishment of the first TV station there has been a proliferation of TV station and online platforms circulating the new genre of popular music videos. During the last decade, new media spaces, including continent-wide TV channels such as Channel O and MTV Africa (both based in South Africa), have created new circuits for the circulation of Tanzanian music videos. New media spaces enabled by liberalization have become sites for negotiating gendered, moral and sociopolitical value. They also serve as imaginative sites of desire and fantasy. Music videos set in the cinematic space of Dar es Salaam's new high-rise buildings and 'exclusive' clubs have become something of a trope in Tanzania. These videos display fantasies of enjoyment and consumption. In so doing, they reflect neo-liberal and individual modes of wealth accumulation which challenge accepted social norms about consumption and wealth. Examining these new contemporary cinematic representations of the city as spaces of fantasy and desire, this article will explore the modes of spectatorship audiences bring to these videos. It will examine how audiences, largely excluded from these exclusive city spaces of consumption and excess, read cityscapes in music videos. This article ultimately sets out the multiplicity, ambiguity and indeterminacy of the desires (both creative and destructive) evoked in audiences by contemporary music video.

Situating U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005) within a diasporic genealogy of black opera that privileges black sonic/aural epistemologies, I am interested in how these knowledges 'disidentify' racialized and gendered hermeneutics of sounding and listening. Through the lens of Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds (2006), I centre black women's cartographies, imagining the black singing voice as, not only soundscape, but a uniquely embodied black geography. Identifying Carmen's singing voice as an embodied black geography, I discuss the sonic cartographies in U-Carmen through close readings of the film's opening and finale, as well as 'La Habanera'/ 'Lwaz'Uthando'. Embracing isiXhosa with Georges Bizet's score, the film struggles against the sonic colour line, challenging and recalibrating our listening ear. Within this soundscape, U-Carmen responds to the patriarchally imagined femme fatale, presenting a Carmen who struggles against gender-based violence.

In this article, I offer a reading of Stories of Our Lives (2014), a documentary about the experiences of queer people who live in the city of Nairobi. I am interested in how through the use of the documentary film, the director of the film and the queer people whose lives are represented, articulate new forms of inhabiting and being in the city. This is despite the legal and political hurdles that govern queer liveability in Kenya. I argue that when queer individuals inhabit, move through, move in, occupy or transit through city spaces in their daily habits, practices, rituals and performances, a rubric is generated. As a form, this rubric of ordinary also works both in, and outside of the convention of the documentary film. This rubric not only destabilizes the circulating discourses about queer sexuality, it also crafts a unique queer subjectivity that transcends the physical limitations of the city that enliven forms of queer world making

This article discusses Maria João Ganga's representations of musseques and the casebre in Na Cidade Vazia (2004). It reads such images and characterization of neglected characters as visual expressions of the way in which Luanda's informal spaces have become the most visible expression of precarious, indeed, excepted citizenship. Set in 1991, the film depicts a period during which the government and the rebels entered a temporary truce, which rapidly disintegrated, gesturing towards a continuing sense of exclusion from postcolonial prosperity. However, the bloody civil war that ensued between rival factions (1975–2002) – the governing Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), led by Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi – remarkably shifted the way post-Portuguese citizenship in Angola could be discussed. It clearly necessitates a new way of thinking about inclusion with respect to the incipient repercussions of indeterminate governance. In the context of this historical process, this article uses exception as a lens to conceptualize postcolonial urban citizenship in Luanda's cinema. The article sets off with an overview of 1975 literary imaginations of Luanda when the Portuguese colonialists were leaving Angola, which resulted in a clamour for the so-called spoils of independence. It then critiques excepted citizenship using two approaches: analysing urban architecture as a visual code for precariousness and filmic characters as embodiments of excepted citizenship.

In this article, I am concerned principally with Taxi Driver (Oriahi, 2015), Gbomo Gbomo Express (Taylaur, 2015), Just Not Married (Patrick, 2016), Ojukokoro (Greed) (Olaitan, 2016) as well as Catch.er (Taylaur, 2017). These films are characterized as much by the depiction of clever criminals as the cultivation of a cynical disposition from which transgressions of this sort appear stylish and violence is rendered 'cool'. Almost all of them turn on a scheme to dupe others of a large sum of money, and are punctuated by backstabbing partners in crime, tables turning by chance, edgy armed standoffs and a surprising number of bodies in car trunks. Given the dark portrait of Lagos these films present, one might be inclined to read the genre cycle as a reiteration of the role Lagos has historically played as embodiment of popular anxieties concerning insecurity, material inequality and social breakdown. And yet, in recent years, conditions within the city have markedly improved over those of the deepest point of urban crisis in the 1990s when Lagos was, indeed, paralysed by a generalized condition of insecurity and dysfunction. New Nollywood's repertoire of film styles has expanded to include international film cycles and genres such as romantic comedies, psychological thrillers, police procedurals, among others. This raises important questions about the nature of correspondences between cinema and the city, such as whether New Nollywood genre films tell us anything about social, cultural or historical circumstances in Lagos, or the place the city occupies in the popular imagination, for instance. Recent upmarket film noirs speak, instead, to the evolution of Lagos as a media capital. I examine the different kinds of work genre performs in New and Old Nollywood films and propose a number of ways to critically interpret genre's various registers.

Where analyses of the city as a landscape often visualize 'urban-ness' through images of tall buildings and concrete, this article thinks about how the genre of romance might turn our attention to other genres of city-as-landscape. I offer Johannesburg from this orientation through a reading of its history as a 'Secret Garden'. Most romance genres rely on a temporal closure of 'happily-ever-after', but here I am interested in other possible endings. This reading of romance I draw from David Scott's (2004) account of romance as a temporal relation to anticolonial struggle. The article examines Kagiso Lediga's 2018 film, Catching Feelings. The film is framed around the narrative of the 'cuckold', which I argue articulates the libidinal economy between the protagonist Max and his friend, Heiner. This libidinal economy is also presented through the landscape of the city. While more accurately defined as a film within the genre of 'bro' or 'lad lit', what Lediga's film does share with chick lit is the way that it borrows from the form of the fairy tale. Through this fairy tale, I locate emergent and continuous forms of masculinity in a history of Johannesburg's landscape through the visual language of the domesticated forest. Through the cuckold as a fairy tale, Lediga offers the city not simply as the place of the action, but as an object of desire, or of fantasy that makes his fragile protagonist 'strange'.