Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Trash: African Cinema from Below
ISBN: 9780253007575
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Refuse and refuse disposal in motion pictures; Motion pictures -- Africa;

An "engaging" study of trash as a metaphor in contemporary African cinema ( African Studies Review ). 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.

Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University. He is author of Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (IUP, 2007).