African Film and Literature

This is a fine work of scholarship that sets a high standard for the discussion of African film. The book brings together-perhaps for the first time in a work of this magnitude--two centers of gravity in African film as it exists now: Francophone West Africa on the one hand and post-apartheid South Africa on the other. Dovey undertakes a thoughtful exploration of the question of adaptation from literature to film. -- Christopher Miller, Yale University This book explores a specific and emergent genre of African filmmaking and the critique of violence found at its center. Lindiwe Dovey's arguments are compelling, innovative, and substantiated. -- James Genova, Ohio State University Once in a while a book is published that instigates a paradigm shift in how we view an object of study. Lindiwe Dovey's African Film and Literature is one of them. By paying attention to African films primarily as films in the process of more complex ethnographic, historical, and sociopolitical elaborations, Dovey delivers a gift to be celebrated. One thinks of the nuance of her observations in the same vein as those of C. L. R. James and his writings on American cinema. -- Ato Quayson, University of Toronto, and author of Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking-one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence. Against a detailed history of the medium's savage introduction and exploitation by colonial powers in two very different African contexts, Dovey examines the complex ways in which African filmmakers are preserving, mediating, and critiquing their own cultures while seeking a united vision of the future. More than merely representing socio-cultural realities in Africa, these films engage with issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, "updating" both the history and the literature they adapt to address contemporary audiences in Africa and elsewhere. Through this deliberate and radical re-historicization of texts and realities, Dovey argues that African filmmakers have developed a method of filmmaking that is altogether distinct from European and American forms of adaptation.