If dirt is ‘matter out of place’ in the oft-quoted phrase of Mary Douglas, then Kenneth Harrow's new monograph puts trash firmly back in the picture for African cinema studies. Harrow discusses trash in all of its complex cinematic manifestations, from the presence of actual rubbish as a visual component to signify poverty, to ‘trashy’ as a metaphor that viewers might apply to particular types of urban subjectivity, to trash as a filmic metonym for postcolonial social relations and global economic relations.
In spite of the book's confrontational title, for Harrow trash in African cinema is anything but the opposite of ‘elite’ or ‘quality’ productions. In fact, he rejects ‘trash’ as a useful adjective for the judgment of cinematic quality and cautions that if the category is redeployed for ideological ends in cinema practice or film criticism – used by directors or critics in any way to ‘illuminate the world’ – then the resistant power of the term will be negated by such acts of political appropriation (p. 15).
Far more than simply a visual metaphor for postcolonial urban inequalities, for Harrow, the presence of trash in African cinema symptomizes the repressed underbelly of the world: trashy objects and trashy subjects bubble up inside films and may be pushed back down, but the effort to hide them from view continuously fails. Here it is a resonant psycho-analytic category that: first, is produced by that which attempts to repress it; second, exists separately from the dominant discourse; and, third, must be understood ‘on its own terms’ rather than in relation to its non-equivalent other which produces it in the hierarchy of high and low.
There is a well-established tradition of art criticism focusing on the use of trash in urban postcolonial art forms, or ‘junk art’ as this transit from the valueless to the value-laden is often termed (Whiteley, 2011; Vergine, 2007). In relation to Africa, Till Förster, Annelise Della Rosa, and others have published on the redeployment of trash in art (Förster, 2013; Della Rosa, 2009). For Harrow, however, such a recuperative perspective, in which trash is always regarded as being in a state of transformation – into art, into recycled objects, into the realm of the functional – does not allow trash its ontological status as trash.
Until the appearance of this book, little if any scholarship had been produced about the African continent's filmic engagements with trash. Yet, as Harrow points out, from Sembene Ousmane's Xala (1974) with its politicized, dirt-bound beggars through to Nollywood movies in present-day Nigeria, trash has been insistently visible in African texts. Why then, he asks, have scholars in the African humanities ignored this ubiquitous trope?
In answering this question, he maps a complex theoretical framework for the study of the types of subject and object that permeate African cinema as the emblems of what mainstream society rejects. He draws inspiration and models from francophone deconstructive theory, from urban anthropology, the anthropology of trash, and from the field of garbology. Using the trope of trash to revisit and interrogate a wide range of theoretical positions, Harrow dedicates extensive sections of the book to the application of Bataille, Rancière, Butler, Mbembe, Žižek, and others to works of African cinema. His project is not simply to apply critical theory to film-texts, however, but to investigate how African films interrogate this body of theory and to generate fresh paradigms for the analysis of what deconstruction regards as the ‘subordinate’ term in the relationship between trash and non-trash.
Whilst he argues forcefully that ‘the view of the garbage dump is clearly different from the view from the garbage dump’ (p. 22), the view from the dump, in this book, is strongly mediated by African film directors, producers, technicians, actors, and the script itself. Harrow does not seek to understand locally available African films from the ground up. For a project that sets out to rethink African cinema ‘from below’, no attention is paid to African audiences' responses to the diverse movies analyzed in the book, nor to the financing, studio locations, personalities, and technologies that make such cinematic variety possible on the continent.
Trash inspires a rigorous questioning of how we think about ‘Africa from below’ in our scholarly research: it is a speculative, probing, provocative book filled with questions about power, exclusion, representation, and subjectivity, and about how African cinema engages social realities without necessarily serving up palatable dishes of realism or political critique.
