In African Film: Re-imagining a Continent, Josef Gugler provides an introduction to African cinema through an analysis of 15 films made by African filmmakers. These directors set out to re-image Africa; their films offer Western viewers the opportunity to re-imagine the continent and its people. As a point of comparison, two additional films on Africa--one from Hollywood, the other from apartheid South Africa--serve to highlight African directors' altogether different perspectives. Gugler's interpretation considers the financial and technical difficulties of African film production, the intended audiences in Africa and the West, the constraints on distribution, and the critical reception of the films.

The book discusses the idea of African identity in the twenty-first century, calling into question and deconstructing any understanding and representation of the idea of African identity as being based exclusively on the notion of ‘Blackness’, or the Black race. In countering such an idea of African identity as a flawed notion, the text propounds the idea of intermediality as a new modality of thinking about the importance of embracing the primacy of tolerance for the difference of identity. The notion of intermediality promotes the need for people of all races across the African continent to embrace the idea of difference as the defining feature of African identity so that the geographical locality called Africa is seen as a vibrant, open, and cosmopolitan continent which is accessible to people of all races and identities.

This book provides a plethora of insights and perspectives that take up and challenge prevailing points of view about today's Africa. The chapters examine a number of different media and topics: from African theatre to poetry, from accounts of personal history to South Africa's language policy and publishing practices. Their unifying theme is a search for tomorrow's cultural trends in an ever-changing Africa.

Re-imagining Development Communication in Africa is organized into three sections or parts, the first focusing on the past and the history of development communication scholarship; the second analyzes theoretical issues, and finally a third section that looks at country cases. The first part provides several perspectives on the historical development of the field as it pertains to Africa. Some of these look at ideological, indigenous contributions, and the particular importance of gender issues. The second section provides a critique of development communication theory and provides a more cultural appropriate alternative. Additionally, the book applies existing theory to practice in African communities. This leads to the third section of the book which focuses on development communication in some country cases such as in Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Foreword (Lúcia Nagib) -- Colonial Reflections, Post-Colonial Refractions: Film and the Moving Image in the Portuguese (Post- )Colonial Situation (Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro) -- Part I The Birth [through Images] of African Nations -- 1"Ruy Duarte: A Cinema of the Word Aspiring to Imagine Angolanness (Maria do Carmo Piçarra) -- 2"Between the Visible and the Invisible: Mueda, Memória e Massacre by Ruy Guerra and the Cultural Forms of the Makonde Plateau (Raquel Schefer) -- 3"Clear Lines on an Internationalist Map: Foreign Filmmakers in Angola at Independence (Ros Gray) -- 4"The Many Returns to Wiriyamu: Audiovisual Testimony and the Negotiation of Colonial Violence (Robert Stock) -- Part II The Fall of the Portuguese Empire: Foreign Gazes during the Cold War -- 5 'Rarely penetrated by camera or film': NBC's Angola:Journey to a War (1961) (Afonso Ramos) -- 6"The US and Portuguese Colonialism as Imagined through Television Drama (Rui Lopes) -- 7"African Independence and the Socialist Republic of Romania's Photographic Archive (Iolanda Vasile) -- Part III Moving Images, Post-Colonial Representations and the Archive -- 8"Colonial Collection of the Portuguese Film Archive: Shot, Reverse Shot, Off-Screen (José Manuel Costa) -- 9"A Decolonizing Impulse: Artists in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Archive, Or the Boxes of Departing Settlers between Maputo, Luanda and Lisbon (Ana Balona de Oliveira) -- 10"In-Between Memory and History: Artists' Films and the Portuguese Colonial Archive (Teresa Castro) -- Part IV Rethinking (Post- )Colonial Narratives: Artistic Takes -- 11 Drawing and Undrawing my Genealogy (Daniel Barroca) -- 12"A Grin without Marker (Filipa César) -- 13"Hotel Globo (Mónica de Miranda) -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

While challenging traditional postcolonial accounts, Gabay places racial anxiety at the heart of imaginaries of Africa and international order.

Religion is often seen as a conservative force in contemporary Africa. In particular, Christian beliefs and actors are usually depicted as driving the opposition to homosexuality and LGBTI rights in African societies. This book nuances that picture, by drawing attention to discourses emerging in Africa itself that engage with religion, specifically Christianity, in progressive and innovative ways--in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTI people. The authors show not only that African Christian traditions harbor strong potential for countering conservative anti-LGBTI dynamics; but also that this potential has already begun to be realized, by various thinkers, activists and movements across the continent. Their ten case studies document how leading African writers are reimagining Christian thought; how several Christian-inspired groups are transforming religious practice; and how African cultural production creatively appropriates Christian beliefs and symbols. In short, the book explores Christianity as a major resource for a liberating imagination and politics of sexuality and social justice in Africa today. Foregrounding African agency and progressive religious thought, this highly original intervention counterbalances our knowledge of secular approaches to LGBTI rights in Africa, and powerfully decolonizes queer theory, theology and politics.