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- Volume 14, Issue 3, 2011
International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2011
Volume 14, Issue 3, 2011
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Towards a new African cinema criticism: From the truth to Déchets Humains
More LessThis article traces the trajectory of progressive African film-making from its early iterations as liberationist to contemporary postcolonial cinema. The critical engagements with Fanon have morphed under the influence of Mbembe, Shohat, Stam, Willemen and others. Political approaches that remain closer to The Empire Strikes Back or Fanon, recently embraced by Armes, are examined in light of Raymond Williams’s exploration of art and commitment, and are contrasted with Stam’s work on hybridity. In the end, the category of Third Cinema, which guided the critical community since the 1960s, is now being supplanted by work that takes into account conditions of cultural production and social conflict, as films like those of Nollywood disrupt the older categories of a serious, engaged African cinema.
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Postcolonial transformations: From Emitaï (Sembène 1971) to Moolaadé (Sembène 2004)
By Sheila PettyThis article explores the shifting geopolitical postcolonial landscape in African cinema and, in particular, focuses on Emitaï and Moolaadé, two works by Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène. Emitaï dates from early in Sembène’s career and focuses on the struggle of a Diola village in the 1940s as it attempts to prevent the French from drafting its young men and ommandeering its rice supply. Moolaadé is representative of Sembène’s later work and focuses on the resistance of Collé Ardo, as she struggles to protect her daughter and three young girls from undergoing excision. Like Emitaï, Moolaadé frames its conflict within the endered space of the village and depicts women as crucial in initiating social change. From this respect, it is tempting to regard Moolaadé as a continuation of the tradition of African ‘return to the source’ films that recoup traditional culture as the solution to Africa’s ongoing struggles. However, despite the similarities, Moolaadé evidences significant differences to Emitaï, especially in terms of its ideological slant and its depiction of traditional culture. Thus, these two films offer the opportunity to consider how the early legacy of frican cinema is being reconstituted and transformed to serve new postcolonial African realities
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Giving a face to the conflict: Contemporary representations of women in Franco-North African film
More LessThis study examines the allegorization of women in Franco-North African film of the 1990s and 2000s. It argues that these contemporary representations trap women between hyper- and disembodiment, with the narration of their subjectivity becoming predicated upon the social violence enacted upon their bodies. Allegory is shown to be a product of the film’s form and narrative, but also a result of its production and reception.
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Interface and erasure in Le Clézio’s ‘Mondo’ and Gatlif’s Mondo (1997): Problems of nterpretation and reception
More LessThe Algerian-born French filmmaker of Romani origin, Tony Gatlif and the Nobel prize-winning French author of Mauritian, French and British origins, J.-M. G. Le Clézio both draw attention to displaced individuals and groups that inhabit the margins of the postcolonial world. Gatlif has done this through films eflecting the history of Romani peoples. Le Clézio has always been devoted to cinema as a means of apprehending experience, yet his works have not been extensively translated to film media. Gatlif’s film Mondo, based on a story by Le Clézio, offers insight into the intersection of these two visions. The reception of both Gatlif’s militancy and Le Clézio’s commitment to writing about underrepresented individuals and communities remains as challenging and uncertain as the future, in Francophone and world cinema, of unclassifiable films like Mondo.
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The filmmaker-narrator as a reflection of/on postcolonial African cinema: Henri Lopes’s Le lys et le flamboyant (1997) and Assia Djebar’s La femme sans sépulture (2002)
More LessThis study examines the way that the postcolonial African filmmaker is represented in the fiction of two major African writers and cultural figures: the Algerian author, historian and filmmaker, Assia Djebar and the Congolese author, Henri Lopes. The partly autobiographical and partly imagined filmmaker of authors such as Djebar and Lopes, is a complex figure of cultural and ethnic ambivalence, selfquestioning, and tentative self-awareness that reflects a continuing dialogue of cultural meaning and reinvention. This dialogue fuels these authors’ witness to the importance of African cinema to the exploration of new forms of community.
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Open-sourcing French culture: The politics of métissage and collective reappropriation in the films of Abdellatif Kechiche
More LessThis article examines in detail the intertextual sources and transcultural strategies of Abdellatif Kechiche’s first three films: La Faute à Voltaire/Blame it on Voltaire (2000), L’Esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003), and La Graine et le mulet/Couscous (2007). It assesses to what degree Kechiche subverts the cultural and symbolic frame politically within the lived context of multi-ethnic France, or simply re-stages the diasporic experience within a syncretic yet politically complacent conceptual frame based around a cultural memory that is almost exclusively French and gestures consistently towards the universal. By tracing each film’s construction of a particular social-cultural frame that actively draws on the symbolic framework of State and Nation, this article reveals how Kechiche’s work of alterity serves to reappropriate and recontextualize key signifiers of French culture by placing them in new, progressive and necessarily ‘impure’ allegorical and symbolic frameworks that operate beyond fixed, essentialist notions of identity (subjective, familial, social, ethnic). Moreover, Kechiche’s cinema ‘de-frames’ itself by foregrounding the performative aspects of cultural métissage, illustrating in the process that personal identity and development is always ‘performed’ in collective solidarity with others. For these reasons, Kechiche’s ‘acts’ of cinematic form may best be conceived as radical ‘social acts’ that herald a new form of transcultural ‘opensourcing’, i.e. a programme of open access and redistribution of French culture that offers up a set of important source codes and texts and positively invites creative modification and reinvention. Such a radical practice of social and cultural mixité demands, ultimately, that we respond in kind by grasping its multiple strands and working together to create new and as yet unimagined social and cultural formations.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 26 (2023)
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Volume 25 (2022)
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Volume 24 (2021)
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Volume 23 (2020)
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Volume 22 (2019)
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Volume 21 (2018)
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Volume 20 (2017)
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Volume 19 (2016)
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Volume 18 (2015)
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Volume 17 (2014)
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Volume 16 (2013)
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Volume 15 (2012 - 2013)
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Volume 14 (2011)
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Volume 13 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 12 (2009)
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Volume 11 (2008)
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Volume 10 (2007)
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Volume 9 (2006)
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Volume 8 (2005)
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Volume 7 (2004)
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Volume 6 (2003)
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Volume 5 (2003)
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Volume 4 (2001 - 2002)