Reframing Africa?

Abstract

Cross-disciplinary studies have come to define twenty-first-century academia. In the process, the question of methodology and its transferal across disciplines raises important concerns abour processes of knowledge generation. The discussions in Reframing Africa? Reflections on Modernity and the Moving Image are generally anchored on “art as research” in respect to the Reframing Africa project—the foundation of this book. It considers the impermanence of the “work of re-viewing and recreating Africa” (2), and the position of African cinemas as archives of this process; and consequently collocates colonial media archives (archives of empire) and those of the African filmmakers (2). This is a sneakpreview of some of the book’s provocations in this subject. In Chapter 1: The Reframing Africa Audio-Visual Project, Cynthia Kros, Reece Auguiste and Pervaiz Khan discuss the significance of cinema in promoting the idea of Africa; its historicity and connection with the colonial project. From a critique of negative discourse on Africa within colonial archives, the authors deny Africa’s nonconditional consumption of colonial tropes. Instead they amplify instances of “critical intervention in research, scholarship and interpretation of colonial cinema in the broader trajectory of African cinema studies” (4). Further, this chapter offers provocative discussions on the urgency and necessity to attend to Africa’s archive and its instabilities, namely: unavailability within the continent or “in an accelerated process of disintegration” (4), truncated pre-colonial history, disunity, fragmentation, and impurity of such histories. The broad discursive space opened up by these instabilities is central to the book’s broad conceptual framework: “centred on the ontology of the African archive, its complicated histories of representation, its multifarious epistemic frames and its materiality as an object of research and critical inquiry that is connected to contemporary debates about African cinemas, emerging cultural practices in the visual arts, social movements in Africa and the African diaspora” (10). In Chapter 2: Cinema, Imperial Conquest, Modernity, the editors draw from South Africa’s cinema texts to reflect on “cinema’s relationship to imperial conquest and its complicity in European constructions of Africa and related