Research Catalog

Title

Ethics and aesthetics in contemporary African cinema : the politics of beauty / James S. Williams.

Author

Williams, James S., 1963-

Publication

• London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019.
• ©2019

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 363 pages : illustrations; 25 cm.

Summary

"James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer ... Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema" --

Series Statement

World cinema series

Uniform Title

Tauris world cinema series.

Subject

• Motion picture industry > Africa
• Aesthetics, African
• Motion picture industry
• Africa

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 320-340); filmography (pages 341-346) and index.

Contents

1. The Trouble with Beauty: Reimagining African Film Aesthetics -- 2. On the Front Line: In/visible Violence, Formations of Style, and Aesthetic Resistance -- 3. Screening Dakar: Locating Beauty in the Afropolis -- 4. Voice, Language, Mystery: From Ideological Struggle to Aesthetic Shudder -- 5. Queering the Baobab: Male Intimacy, the Erotics of Abstraction, and the Right to Beauty -- 6. On the Border, Becoming World: Migrant Beauty, Migratory Narratives, and the Transmigration of Cinematic Form -- 7. The Afropolitan Present .

Call Number

Sc E 19-730

ISBN

• 9781784533366
• 178453336X
• 9781784533359
• 1784533351

OCLC

959534505

Author

Williams, James S., 1963- author.

Title

Ethics and aesthetics in contemporary African cinema : the politics of beauty / James S. Williams.

Publisher

London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019.

Copyright Date

©2019

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

World cinema series

Tauris world cinema series.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 320-340); filmography (pages 341-346) and index.

Research Call Number

Sc E 19-730