African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film.
Volume Three of this landmark series on African cinema spans the past century and is devoted to the documentation of decoloniality in cultural policy in both Africa and the Black diaspora worldwide. A compendium of formal resolutions, declarations, manifestos, and programmatic statements, it chronologically maps the long history and trajectories of cultural policy in Africa and the Black Atlantic. Beginning with the 1920 declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which anticipates cinema as we know it today, and the formal oppositional assertions—aspirational and practical. The first part of this work references formal statements that pertain directly to cultural policy and cinematic formations in Africa, while the next part addresses the Black diaspora. Each entry is chronologically ordered to account for when the statement was created, followed by where and in what context it was enunciated.
Michael T. Martin is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is editor or coeditor of several anthologies, including (with David C. Wall) The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man and Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Martin directed and coproduced the award-winning feature documentary on Nicaragua, In the Absence of Peace, distributed by Third World Newsreel. Gaston Jean-Marie Kaboré is a film director, producer, and screenwriter and the former director of the Centre National du Cinéma in Burkina Faso.