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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Social realist cinema and representations of power in African nationalist discourse
Author:Eyoh, DicksonISNI
Year:1998
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:29
Issue:2
Pages:112-127
Language:English
Geographic term:Africa
Subjects:power
cinema
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820725
Abstract:In its representations of the relationships between forms of power in society, African social realist cinema advances a sophisticated view of how the forces of institutional and cultural pluralism underscore the postcolonial predicament of African societies. African social realist cinema shares the discourse of radical political economy of the 1970s and early 1980s on the postcolonial experience. However, a greater sensitivity to the cultural and symbolic dimensions of political power enables social realist cinema to avoid some of the more profound limitations of the radical political economy perspective. Three films that are representative of the genre, Ousmane Sembene's 'Xala', Gaston Kabore's 'Zan Boko', and Cheick Oumar Sissoko's 'Finzan', illustrate social realist cinema's greater success in revealing the complexity of power relations in African society. The use of a double perspective - a traditionalist point of view and a modernist point of view - is key to social realist cinema's ability to transcend the reductive explanation of the nature and dynamics of power and detail the many faces and complexity of power relations in postcolonial Africa. Bibliogr.
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