Trash

African Cinema from Below

Kenneth W. Harrow

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253007575
• Print ISBN:
  9780253007513

An "engaging" study of trash as a metaphor in contemporary African cinema ( African Studies Review).
Highlighting what is melodramatic, flashy, low, and gritty in the characters, images, and plots of African cinema, Kenneth W. Harrow uses trash as the unlikely metaphor to show how these films have depicted the globalized world. Rather than focusing on topics such as national liberation and postcolonialism, he employs the disruptive notion of trash to propose a destabilizing aesthetics of African cinema.
Harrow argues that the spread of commodity capitalism has bred a culture of materiality and waste that now pervades African film. He posits that a view from below permits a way to understand the tropes of trash present in African cinematic imagery.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Bataille, Stam, and Locations of Trash
• 2. Rancière: Aesthetics, Its Mésententes and Discontents
• 3. The Out-of-Place Scene of Trash
• 4. Globalization’s Dumping Ground: The Case of Trafigura
• 5. Agency and the Mosquito: Mitchell and Chakrabarty
• 6. Trashy Women: Karmen Gei, l’Oiseau Rebelle
• 7. Trashy Women, Fallen Men: Fanta Nacro’s “Puk Nini” and La Nuit de la vérité
• 8. Opening the Distribution of the Sensible: Kimberly Rivers and Trouble the Water
• 9. Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako and the Image: Trash in Its Materiality
• 10. The Counter-Archive for a New Postcolonial Order: O Herói and Daratt
• 11. Nollywood and Its Masks: Fela, Osuofia in London, and Butler’s Assujetissement
• 12. Trash’s Last Leaves: Nollywood, Nollywood, Nollywood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index