Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City

This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective.

“Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the “African urban”. Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion.

Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.

Danai S. Mupotsa teaches in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect, and feminist pedagogies. Danai has edited several volumes, most recently Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele; a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck, and Black Transnational Feminisms and the Question of Structure, (forthcoming) co-edited with Lyn Ossome and Athi Nkopo.

Polo B. Moji is Associate Professor in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a PhD in General and Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and her research areas include comparative anglophone/francophone literary and cultural studies, critical black geographies, and literary urban studies. She is the author of Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (2022).

Natasha Himmelman is a Puerto Rican/Latinx queer researcher and educator (es una investigadora y educadora puertorriqueña/Latinx cuir). She is an independent researcher whose affiliations have included, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesberg, South Africa; and the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg. South Africa.