African 605: Dakar-Paris: Postcolonial Horizontality in African and French Cinemas

This course explores postcolonial connections between sub-Saharan cinema and French cinema, 1959-2020. It searches to show that the circulation and consumption of cinematic cultural forms and practices moves, to borrow one of Achille Mbembe’s favorite words, “horizontally” between Global North and Global South. In the process, we will learn about the history of these two cinematic traditions, about the particular aesthetics of the French and African auteurs, we will debate issues of spatiality (for the two cities from the title), movement, body, Subjectivity, race, and racism.

African films: Black Girl (1966), Touki Bouki (1973), Xala (1975), Abouna (2002), Bamako (2006), The President (2013), Atlantiques (2019), A Season in France (2019)

French films: 400 Blows (1959), Hate (1998), Le Grand voyage (2004), Intouchables (2011), Au Service de la France (TV show, 2015-2017), Les Misérables (2019), Cuties (2020),

Selected Readings: Laila Amine (Postcolonial Paris), Achille Mbembe (Out of the Dark Night), Tom Conley (Cartographic Cinema), Felwine Sarr (Afrotopia), Mudimbe (The Invention of Africa).