Meaninglessness

Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61186-438-0
Verlag: Michigan State University Press

Buch, Englisch, 220 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: African Humanities and the Arts

For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten

Über Autor(innen)

Vlad Dima is a professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on francophone and French cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017) and The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa (2020).