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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
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  3. FILM 44.12 - The Idea of Africa
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FILM 44.12 - The Idea of Africa

This is a course guide for FILM 44.12.
  • Home
    • Course description
    • In the Library's collections
    • Introductory reading(s)
    • Selected book title(s)
    • Other library resource(s)
    • Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)
    • Internet resource(s)
    • Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References
    • Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature

Subject Librarian

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Lucinda M. Hall
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Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies, Geography, Polar Studies

Course description

This course will consider the mapping of race onto the idea of Africa and how Africa came to constitute a unique racial category. We will therefore conduct an “archeology of race” and engage the argument by historians of race in Africa that Africa was a major laboratory of race. Our primary material will consist of motion pictures, in an effort to reckon with the role of motion pictures as prime technologies of racial othering and their deep imbrications in colonial projects.

[Source: Registrar, 03/12/2024] Dist:ART; WCult:NW

In the Library's collections

You can use one of these subject headings to start your research in the library's online catalog:

  • africa in motion pictures
  • race in motion pictures
  • motion pictures africa
    Call number range PN 1993.5 .A35 on Baker Stacks Level 4.

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover artAfrican film: re-imagining a continent by Josef Gugler
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .A35 G77 2003
    ISBN: 9780253216434
    In African Film: Re-imagining a Continent, Josef Gugler provides an introduction to African cinema through an analysis of 15 films made by African filmmakers. These directors set out to re-image Africa; their films offer Western viewers the opportunity to re-imagine the continent and its people. ...
  • Cover ArtDirectory of world cinema Africa by Blandine Stefanson; Sheila Petty, eds.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781783203918
    Eschewing the postcolonial hubris that suggests Africa could only define itself in relation to its colonizers, a problem plaguing many studies published in the West on African cinema, this entry in the Directory of World Cinema series instead looks at African film as representing Africa for its own sake, values, and artistic choices. With a film industry divided by linguistic heritage, African directors do not have the luxury of producing comedies, thrillers, horror films, or even love stories, except perhaps as DVDs that do not travel far outside their country of production. Instead, African directors tend to cover serious sociopolitical ground, even under the cover of comedy, in the hopes of finding funds outside Africa. ...
  • Cover artFocus on African films by Françoise Pfaff, ed.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .A35 F63 2004
    ISBN: 9780253216687
    Emphasizing post-independent films released since the 1950s and the burgeoning commercial film production of the last decade, Focus on African Films provides unique and pluralistic perspectives on film-making throughout Africa. As a whole, the collection highlights the distinct thematic, stylistic, and socioeconomic circumstances of African film-making. ...
  • Cover ArtNew African cinema by Valérie K. Orlando
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780813589954
    New African Cinema examines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers from the early post-colonial years into the new millennium. Offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema since the 1960s, Valérie K. Orlando highlights the variations in content and themes that reflect the socio-cultural and political environments of filmmakers and the cultures they depict in their films. ...
  • Cover artPostcolonial African cinema: ten directors by David Murphy; Patrick Williams
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .A35 M79 2007
    ISBN: 9780719072031
    This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. ...

Selected book title(s)

  • Cover ArtAfrica in the American imagination: popular culture, racialized identities, and African visual culture by Carol Magee
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781617031526
    In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Racialized Identities, and African Visual Culture explores this presence, examining Mattel's world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. ...
  • Cover ArtFacts, fiction, and African creative imaginations by Toyin Falola; Fallou Ngom, eds.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry DT 14 .F3185 2010
    ISBN: 9780203872659
    This volume brings together insights from distinguished scholars from around the world to address the facts, fiction and creative imaginations in the pervasive portrayals of Africa, its people, societies and cultures in the literature and the media. The fictionalization of Africa and African issues in the media and the popular literature that blends facts and fiction has rendered perceptions of Africa, its cultures, societies, customs, and conflicts often superficial and deficient in the popular Western consciousness. ...
  • Cover ArtNavigating the African diaspora: the anthropology of invisibility by Donald Martin Carter
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry DT 16.5 .C38 2010
    ISBN: 9780816647781
    Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, Donald Martin Carter raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, he explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants. ...
  • Cover ArtPostcolonial agency in African and diasporic literature and film by Lokangaka Losambe
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780429322426
    This book chronicles the rise and the development of postcolonial agency since Africa's encounter with Western modernity through African and African diaspora literature and film. Using African and African diasporic imaginaries (creative writings, autobiographies, polemical writings, and filmic media), the author shows how African subjects have resisted enslavement and colonial domination over the past centuries, and how they have sought to reshape "global modernity". ...
  • Cover artTrash: African cinema from below by Kenneth W. Harrow
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .A35 H375 2013
    ISBN: 9780253007513
    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 post-colonialism, he employs the disruptive notion of trash to propose a destabilizing aesthetics of African cinema.

Other library resource(s)

  • Resource logoAfrican cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Frank Ukadike
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    The term “African cinema” generally refers to film production in Sub-Saharan African countries. Compared to the other national cinemas in the world, African cinema can be said to be a recent phenomenon that for many countries within this region only began to materialize after independence in the 1960s. ...
  • Resource logoLibrary of African cinema by Various directors
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Streaming video - there are other formats in the Jones Media Center
    Films from Africa made by Africans offer restorative images and a new film language. The beautiful and sometimes challenging films in this collection not only showcase the works of master filmmakers but also innovative new talents who are embracing video technology. To see Africa through African eyes will break stereotypes and enlighten viewers about life in Africa.

Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)

You can find scholarly literature for African cinema in a variety of journals. However, if you want to do targeted searching, you can use a subject specific database such as Film & Television Literature Index. You can also use the search box at the top of the page.

  • Resource logoFilm & television literature index
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    This index covers over 300 journal and magazine titles for film and television reviews, scholarly and critical analysis of cinema and television, and articles of popular interest about film and television. About half the journals and magazines are film periodicals and the other half cover film and television with some regularity. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.
  • Resource logoallAfrica.com
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    Contains over 700,000 articles from 100 news publications throughout Africa and from several hundred other sources, including governments, non-governmental organizations and other news makers, inside and outside of Africa.
  • Resource logoScreen studies collection by ProQuest
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    A comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed filmographies. This collection includes the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute (AFI) and the British Film Institute.
  • Resource logoWeb of science citation databases by Clarivate
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.

Internet resource(s)

  • African Diaspora International Film Festival logo
    African Diaspora International Film Festival
    • Link
    Established in 1993, the African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) is a Harlem based minority-led not-for profit international film festival that presents, interprets and educates about films that explore the human experience of people of color all over the world in order to inspire imaginations, disrupt stereotypes and help transform attitudes that perpetuate injustice. ...
  • Southern African film: towards a regional narration of the nation
    • Link
    A paper presented at the "Refiguring Postcoloniality Conference" at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia on February 18, 2000 by Martin Mhando.

Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References

Use this guide to help you learn how to correctly cite and keep track of the references you find for your research.

  • Citation Resources
    • Link
    Resources to help you cite and manage references.

Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Film Studies? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.

  • Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024 1:34 PM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/film4412courseguide
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