Ken Harrow

Distinguished Professor, African cinema, Michigan State University

Email: harrow@msu.edu

Phone: (517) 803-8839

https://film.marcom.cal.msu.edu/faculty/harrow/

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Harrow, Kenneth W. African Filmmaking: Five Formations. African Humanities and the Arts. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017.

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema - that is, five “formations” of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance- each in its own way. The history of South Africa, heavily marked by apartheid and its struggles, differs considerably from that of Egypt, which early on developed its own “Hollywood on the Nile.” The history of French colonialism impacted the three countries of the Maghreb - Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—differently than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where Senegal and Sembène had their own great effect on the Sahelian region. Anglophone Africa, particularly the films of Ghana and Nigeria, has dramatically altered the ways people have perceived African cinema for decades. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.

[Source: Google Books].

Harrow, Kenneth W. Postcolonial African Cinema from Political Engagement to Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinema—one that requires that we revisit the beginnings of African filmmaking and the critical responses to which they gave rise, and that we ask what limitations they might have contained, what price was paid for the approaches then taken, and whether we are still caught in those limitations today. Using Žižek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodern-based approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practice — one in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive reading of the political and the ideological. The major works of Sembène Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cisse, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Jean-Marie Teno, Bassak baKohbio, and Fanta Nacro are explored, while at the same time the project of current postmodern theory, especially that of Jameson, is called into question in order that an African postmodernist cultural enterprise might be envisioned.

[Source: Indiana University Press].

Harrow, Kenneth W. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Highlighting what is melodramatic, flashy, low, and gritty in the characters, images, and plots of African cinema, Kenneth W. Harrow uses trash as the unlikely metaphor to show how these films have depicted the globalized world. Rather than focusing on topics such as national liberation and postcolonialism, he employs the disruptive notion of trash to propose a destabilizing aesthetics of African cinema. Harrow argues that the spread of commodity capitalism has bred a culture of materiality and waste that now pervades African film. He posits that a view from below permits a way to understand the tropes of trash present in African cinematic imagery.

[Source: Indiana University Press].

Harrow, Kenneth W., ed. African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press, 1999.

This collection of essays deals directly and compellingly with contemporary issues in African cinema. In particular, they address key aspects of post-colonialism and feminism - the two major topics of interest in current criticism of African films - but coverage is also given to spectatorship, national identity, ethnography, patriarchy, and the creation of key film industries in developing countries.

[Source: Google Books].

Harrow, Kenneth W., ed. With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema. Matatu 19, n° 1 (1997).

"The work of African women filmmakers is relatively unknown, except for local audiences and specialists; and, as a result, there is little recognition for what has become, and what continues to become, a growing, important body of womanist, feminist, or simply female cinema.”

[Source: Excerpt from the introduction, p. vii]

Hassan Hajjaj

Artist

Photography, print

Morocco

UK/Morocco

laracheshop.co.uk

Salah M. Hassan

Professor, African and African Diaspora  Art History, Cornell University

sh40@cornell.edu

607/255-0528

https://africana.cornell.edu/salah-m-hassan