Following the image: Examining the multiple afterlives of apartheid-era prison identification photographs

Drawing on debates on materiality, this article investigates the lives and multiple afterlives of prison identification photographs of individuals hanged by the apartheid state in South Africa during the 1960s for crimes framed as political. In recent years these photographs have been recovered and repurposed as part of post-apartheid nation-building and memorialization projects. Under the auspices of the Gallows Memorialization Project, bureaucratic records and photographs have been recovered from the apartheid state archives, reinterpreted and placed into different and new ‘presentational circumstances’ that desires to overturn their original oppressive logic. However, as the photographs and documents are used to fix the identities of particular individuals that the project seeks to commemorate, the logic that drives their reproduction in the new configurations and contexts seems to replicate the bureaucratic rationality that produced them.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

(Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts, and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire, Maria Do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro (eds) (2017)

Review of: (Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts, and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire, Maria Do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro (eds) (2017) Oxford: Peter Lang, 287 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78707-318-0, p/bk, $33

Moving still: Bicycles in Ranchhod Oza’s photographs of 1950s Stone Town (Zanzibar)

Stone Town’s busy streets in the 1950s became a set for photographer Ranchhod Oza, proprietor of Capital Art Studio (1930–83). I was aesthetically drawn to the numerous bicycles portrayed in these Zanzibari images, just as Oza had been at an earlier time and place. I am less interested in reading the subject of bicycles as simply a sign of Zanzibari modernity, an accoutrement that projects a fantasy of advancement via technological things. Instead, I focus on their ability to reflect various material aspects of daily life in Stone Town. Some bicycles carry people, others transport things, while still others appear as stage props, leaning up against walls while waiting (im)patiently for their owners to return. Yet in all these Oza images, they are moving still, ready to reach another chosen destination. What does the content of bicycles say about Oza’s photographic style? Can these bicycles potentially speak to Zanzibar’s placeness as a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean port city?

The role of place and identity as core contributing success factors in Jayan Moodley’s Keeping up with the Kandasamys and Kandasamys: The Wedding

Keeping up with the Kandasamys (Moodley 2017), a family comedy co-written and directed by Jayan Moodley, was the first cinematic feature to be set in the post-apartheid Indian township of Chatsworth, Durban and generated R16.3 million at the box office. The film delves into the matriarchal rivalry of neighbouring families while showcasing the unique Chatsworth subculture. This box office success prompted the release of the sequel Kandasamys: The Wedding (Moodley 2019), which broke its own sales record, earning R18.9 million. As filmmakers who were intimately involved in the production of the sequel, and who engaged with viewers and community members, we provide a critical analysis, reflecting on why the films attracted large audiences and galvanized an outburst of fandom. This article postulates that Indian South African audiences identified with the authentic portrayal of the nuances of every-day life in Chatsworth, resulting in feelings of visibility and nostalgia. In attempting to explain the phenomenal support from these audiences, the authors examine theories of place identity and literature on Indian South African identity, inferring that the intersection of place, and the representation of Indian South Africans in the features, is significant to the films’ success.

Presence and exhibition of African film in Harlem

Throughout the twentieth-century American history, the circulation of African arts in the New York City runs parallel with African American activism. The African on-screen presence in Harlem needs to be examined in this broader context in order to better grasp the historical trajectory of its development in the neighbourhood and also the encounters and exchanges between Africans and African Americans. Today, the increased interest in African screen media productions result from the confluence of two phenomena: the current Black renaissance and the reconfigurations of African cinema under the influence of migration. Harlem is once again playing a pivotal role in the dissemination of African culture, specifically African cinema in the New York City.

Opening the wound: Receptions and readings of Inxeba in South Africa

This reading of Inxeba (2017) foregrounds the relationship between the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements in South Africa with the theme of wounding as an enduring social affliction in a country caught up in the midst of redefining itself after apartheid. Overtly narrated in the telling of Inxeba (2017) is the striking, amplified distinction between tradition and modernity among isiXhosa. Indeed, the polarized reception of the film among South African audiences shone a light on the slow burn of this most enduring trope. At universities across the country, Black students called for an end to the symbols of imperialist and colonialist White domination, as well as the desire to decolonize higher education by redressing Eurocentric canons of knowledge production. On the heels of the #Fallist movements, a White director makes a film about Xhosa initiation, and folds into this story a tale of homoerotic love. Notwithstanding the film’s official entry for best foreign language film at the Oscars, multiple forms of wounding came quick and heated upon the showcasing of the film’s trailer on social media. Film: Inxeba (English: The Wound): 2017 South African drama Director: John Trengove Language: Xhosa Cast: Niza Jay Ncoyini as Kwanda Nakhane Touré as Xolani Bongile Mantsai as Vija

Political economy of Nollywood: A literature review

Political economy studies control and survival in social life. It is simply defined as the study of production and exchange and how these activities relate with the state and its laws. It is interested in how politics interacts with economics. Extensive essays and texts on the political economy of the film industry in general, and of Hollywood in particular abound. Such studies on Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, remains scarce. But in recent times, authors, both indigenous and foreign, are beginning to give increased attention to the struggle for power and control within the industry. This study is interested in how economic activities in Nollywood interact with the law and government. It searches existent scholarship to interrogate what has been discussed on aspects of the political economy of the industry. It discusses these studies under production, distribution and consumption. It reviews other important industry matters like policies, interrogating briefly the place of MOPICON in the political economy of Nollywood. This review forms an important document for research on Nollywood, to curb and forestall consistent repetition of studies within Nollywood scholarship.

Experiments in cinematic biography: Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema

Contemporary scholarship on South African film is yet to address the participation of Black actors in film production, exhibition and publicity. The actors’ interpretive roles in the films, their memories and experiences, and the contradictions of their participation in colonial films and beyond, form part of an unexplored and hidden archive in South African film scholarship. This article focuses on Ken Gampu’s early life in the cinema by reflecting on his participation in two films: a western The Hellions and the drama Dingaka. Gampu was a well-known South African actor and also the first Black actor from that country to succeed in Hollywood. This article proposes an experimental methodology of life-writing called ‘cinematic biography’. It shows that the cinematic lives of the marginalized and colonized actors harbour critical potential in enriching the critical perspectives on the cinema and cinematic cultures in South Africa and beyond.