Africa in Cinema

Africa in Cinema approaches film as a material, ideological, and affective practice through which “Africa” has been made visible, legible, governable, and at times unrepresentable. The course analyses cinema as a discursive system that organises meaning, desire, and spectatorship through image, sound, rhythm, narration, and modes of address. Film emerges as a site where colonial epistemologies, racialised regimes of seeing, and counter-visual practices converge and are actively contested. Within this terrain, cinema is approached as a transformative practice that organises signs within specific historical conditions, shaping perception and meaning. The course combines a diachronic engagement with African cinema and sustained formal analysis, situating films within the theoretical traditions that have shaped film studies and its critiques.