Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinema―one that requires that we revisit the beginnings of African filmmaking and the critical responses to which they gave rise, and that we ask what limitations they might have contained, what price was paid for the approaches then taken, and whether we are still caught in those limitations today.Using Žižek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodern-based approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practice―one in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive reading of the political and the ideological. The major works of Sembène Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cisse, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno, Bassak ba Kohbio, and Fanta Nacro are explored, while at the same time the project of current postmodern theory, especially that of Jameson, is called into question in order that an African postmodernist cultural enterprise might be envisioned.

Harrow's provocative book introduces a psychoanalytic dimension to the study of African women's writing. In so doing, he opens up relatively uncharted terrain in African literary studies. Comprehensive, nuanced, occasionally lyrical, the book covers an impressive range of hitherto neglected francophone novels that are examined alongside canonical anglophone texts. The author places these texts in their colonial and postcolonial contexts, developing upon, and linking, structuralist theories of colonialism and patriarchy. This study offers a radical new position for those scholars who have long sought alternatives to the liberal humanist bias pervading many studies of African women's writing.Students often struggle with the models employed by feminist and postcolonial theorists such as Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha. The clarity with which Harrow explains the positions of such theorists makes his book an essential companion to, and commentary upon, their publications. Kenneth Harrow's study will be of interest not only to African literature specialists, but also to non-literary scholars concerned with questions about feminism, gender construction, colonialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory. (view table of contents)

Product Description: this third volume in the WORLD LITERATURE AND THOUGHT series contains an astonishing variety of primary reading selections. The anthology features literary, historical, and philosophical works that reflect a global diversity of all major civilizations...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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African literature in the twentieth century has grown from the early poetry of Negritude to recent novels of magical realism. As novelists, poets, and playwrights testified to the unique qualities of their lives and societies, a new tradition began to emerge. Novels of testimony, novels of revolt, novels of struggle, followed by post-colonial writings, filled with complexities and ambiguities, have created a literary tradition expressive of the African spirit-a tradition influenced by earlier African oral literature, by European writings, by changing social conditions, and increasingly by African writings themselves. Thresholds of Change in African Literature explores the emergence of this tradition, and particularly the ways in which the emergent literature changed at each critical stage (view table of contents)

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