Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City

Danai S. Mupotsa, Polo B. Moji, Natasha Himmelman, Danai S. Mupotsa, Polo B. Moji, Natasha Himmelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032533193
• eBook ISBN: 9781000924404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective.

"Reading" the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as "Afropolitanism, " "Afro-polis", "Afro-modernity" and "Afro-urbanity", which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the "African urban". Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion.

Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Lagos in contemporary Nigerian music video: Brymo’s “1 Pound (The Documentary)”
• 3 Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu: a relationship of feminist expression, aesthetics and memory
• 4 Joburg without Joburg: the black South African romcom
• 5 “There is only one place for me. It is here, entabeni” Inxeba (2017), Kalushi (2016) and the difficulties of “the urban” for the New South African Man
• 6 Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of relation in apartheid-era cinema
• 7 Hollywood imagines urban Africa, and it’s as bad as you think
• 8 Embodiments of love on the margins of Windhoek’s cinematic landscape
• 9 Kurt Orderson’s Not in My Neighbourhood (2018): spatial violence in Cape Town, New York and São Paulo
• Index