Acculturation and imagination as social practice in Heremakono

This article investigates the relationship between contemporary global cultural flows of media and migration in West Africa, and the perceived effects of acculturation on the African imagination. Considering acculturation as a key concern of Sissako's film Heremakono/En attendant le bonheur/Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002), the article explores how the construction of an African imagination is complicated by the way in which West African cinema itself works within a transnational milieu. The article firstly considers the film's representation of the disjunctures of the global economy and its negative affects on cultures and peoples of the global South. However, it continues by contextualizing the film's mode of production as part of a system that works from a Franco-Parisian centre, repositioning the film within a broader transnational milieu and complicating reading the film through a North/South cultural dichotomy.