The three books discussed here represent engaging, current scholarship in film studies. All three volumes focus on how Africa is mediatized, politicized, and imagined in the West. The two edited volumes and one monograph, discussing films primarily made in the last fifteen years, are informative, well-written, and useful for specialists as well as students interested in film criticism.

Both edited volumes, Framing Africa and Hollywood’s Africa after 1994, highlight Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s well-articulated view, as contextualized in Unthinking Eurocentricism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994), that “British-dominated imperialism of the nineteenth century faded into the U.S.-dominated imperialism of the twentieth” on the African continent (113). Colonial powers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have changed hats, leaving Africa still without power over the telling of its own story in films made by Hollywood. White Anglo-European hegemony has continued to produce confection narratives of “positional superiority” (Edward Said’s term, cited in Shohut and Stam), which favor codified, familiar, Western stereotypes of the continent and produce an imaginary that since Conrad has promoted Africa as a “heart of darkness” on which Europe would write its destiny. Maryellen Higgins notes in her introduction to Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 that “colonial formulas” and “western rescue fantasies still permeate representations of Africa” in films made by U.S. filmmakers (9).

By mean of several examples, Michael O’Riley’s Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History demonstrates how the West, particularly the United States and France, has conveniently used its “positional superiority” to manipulate popular stereotypes held about North Africa, Arabs, and Islam in order to further war, violence, and Western domination in the Arab world. One of the most engaging chapters in the book focuses on the Italian social-realist filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous film The Battle of Algiers (1965), and how the film functioned for the U.S. military and the Pentagon in the 2000s “as a cartographic process that mapped out the uncertain contours of the war in Iraq” (45). This contemporary manipulation and repackaging of a film’s messages, originally meant to explain the reasons for resistance during a time of colonial fascism, totally discounts the revolutionary significance Pontecorvo sought to impart to audiences in the 1960s. The revolutionary awakening that eventually inspired Third World movements across the globe is completely lost in the Pentagon’s re-visioning of the film. Pontecorvo’s central thesis about the Algerian struggle for freedom, O’Riley argues, was conveniently repackaged in order to help promote the warmongering fervor that took place during the Bush Administration. Taking The Battle of Algiers utterly out of its original context in order to use it to influence political rhetoric to sanctify the push for war and torture attests to the degree to which films made about “Others” across Africa and the Middle East can be exploited by the West. O’Riley notes that in the age of spectacles such as “crumpling trade towers, suicide bombers, burning embassies, and tortured bodies [which] have become commonplace images . . . [in] the age of terror” we must now “raise questions as to what we are to do with such images and what type of response is appropriate” (1). How will images past and present be used to politically situate North Africa for decades to come is one of the seminal questions the author puts to his readers.

All three works are effective in exposing the “complex of received ideas” (Higgins, 3) that are perpetuated by films made about Africa in the West. Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 is composed of fifteen essays written by scholars in the fields of film studies, English, international studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and African literatures. The essays engage the primary question of whether or not films made particularly in the U.S. since 1994—the year of the Rwandan genocide, which “pricked the consciousness of human rights advocates worldwide” as well as “Hollywood celebrities” (3)—have shifted focus from stereotypes to generating more awareness about human rights abuses. Do these films favor “humanitarian consciousness”-raising among Western audiences? In her introduction, Higgins asks whether or not Hollywood films are “projections of well-intentioned military humanitarianism and regime change” or simply “philanthropic imperialism”? (7) Has Hollywood been able to foster any meaningful discussions about the conflicts and struggles Africans face day to day, from land mines left by civil war fighting, to blood diamonds and pharmaceutical experimentation? Are Africans represented fairly? Or are films such as Black Hawk Down (2001), The Constant Gardener (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), and Sahara (2005) simply a “reshaping of the colonial archive” that is still possessed by the “world’s most powerful nations?” (7)

Framing Africa’s seven essays, edited by Nigel Eltringham, study the “distinct language/script” that is often “employed to describe ‘Africa’” (6–7) in Western news outlets and how these narratives are transposed on film. “European and North American audiences do not really get any news from Africa, only repetitive images that correspond to notions about Africa already existent in the minds of Westerners” (7–8). Drawing on many of the same films that are explored in Hollywood’s Africa after 1994—Black Hawk Down, Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, and The Last King of Scotland (2006)—Framing Africa’s essays are crafted by leading historians and anthropologists from the United Kingdom and the United States. The authors’ comments are particularly interesting with respect to exposing the typical stereotypes associated with the continent. Interestingly, the subject of many of the essays in this volume is how filmmakers take liberties with historical accuracy and the general historical information depicted in their cinematic works. The historical lens used to craft these analyses is what makes this edited volume essentially unique in scope. Framing Africa, thus, would be useful in courses not only on film but also on African history.

Impressive is the wide geographical swath of sub-Saharan Africa that is covered in this volume, moving from Uganda and Mark Leopold’s chapter on The Last King of Scotland (2006) about Idi Amin Dada, president of the country from 1971 to 1979, to Lidwien Kapteijns’s essay on Somalia as depicted Black Hawk Down. Subsequent chapters move from Kenya as the backdrop for The Constant Gardener, analyzed in Daniel Branch’s chapter, to Sierra Leone in Danny Hoffman’s work on Blood Diamond. Rwanda and the genocide that took place there in 1994 is explored in Nigel Eltringham’s essay on the films Shooting Dogs (2005) and Hotel Rwanda. Postapartheid South Africa is the focus of Annelies Verdoolaege’s chapter on Red Dust (2004) and, in the last chapter, Derek Charles Catsam contributes an essay on Invictus (2009), a film documenting the election of Nelson Mandela and his influence on the “spirit of reconciliation” in South Africa.

All chapters in Framing Africa ask the formidable question: do these films instruct audiences about Africa, or do they fall into recognizable stereotypes highlighting poverty, bloodshed, war, victimization, starvation, tribalism, disease, and so on, that are almost always topics connected to the continent? Mark Leopold’s chapter on The Last King of Scotland deftly challenges this question by historically discussing how the film about the dictator Idi Amin is both fact and fiction, suggesting that it offers “mediations on the power of myth, where myth is neither truth nor fiction. It operates in the realm of metaphor” (35). Leopold points out that the film, loosely based on Amin’s life, contains inherent tensions caused by the intermingling of both fiction and myth. In the end, while trying to avoid stereotypes, The Last King of Scotland places “a white character at the center of the narrative [, which] tends to reduce the film to the standard sub-Conradian cliché of Africa as a blank contrast to European heroism” (11). However, to give the film its due, Leopold also notes that “what may be literally false, but metaphorically true” emphasizes also the nuanced history surrounding Idi Amin. “In a sense, myths or legends may be truer to the realities of life than a pure recitation of fully confirmed facts. . . .The reception of Whitaker’s portrayal of Amin among Ugandans and others who knew the dictator demonstrates that a great performance may operate as a truth over and above any factual inaccuracies of the storyline” (35). Since Idi Amin’s rule was mediated through the mythical and the grandiose, arriving at a truthful, historically accurate conclusion, is often difficult.

Black Hawk Down, which “recasts U.S. military history at Somali expense,” more readily fits the mold of the stereotypical film about impoverished, war-torn Africa (39). Lidwien Kapteijns’s chapter on Ridley Scott’s 2001 film critically scrutinizes how historically the events of October 1993 are misrepresented. The film first “conceals and misrepresents U.S. involvement in Somalia” prior to this date (40). Second, it offers a “mythic enhancement of the characters representing the U.S. military and the mythic diminishment of those portraying Somalis.” Kapteijns notes that, in general, the “film misrepresents both . . . to the glory of the former and at the expense of the latter” (40). Due to the exploitation of the historic moment of 9/11 (the film was released just after the terrorist attacks), Black Hawk Down was able to make the case for the “necessity of U.S. military intervention in the world” (40–41). Not only is the film a misrepresentation of the country in which the events take place, it is also used as a vehicle for the affirmation for the U.S.’s war on terror. The film essentially, “enables a preferred reading that war is necessary and that fighting (and occasionally dying) for the cause is the messy but noble work U.S. soldiers do and do well. And finally, the film renders Third World ‘others’ like the Somalis as incidental and morally irrelevant to this necessary work” (65).

Nigel Eltringham’s chapter focusing on the films Shooting Dogs and Hotel Rwanda is one of the best in the volume. Discussing “how to show what cannot even be imagined?”—the famous question pronounced by Elie Wiesel in the context of the Holocaust—is reapplied here to analyze the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s. “How is one to tell a tale that cannot be—but must be—told?” is a core question considered in the editor’s chapter (113). Eltringham notes that “both films adopt a classical realist form,” giving the “illusion of experiencing not discordant memory or a mediated narrative, but mastery over the past, the authentic reproduction of reality . . . whereby the image becomes no more than a window onto unmediated ‘reality’” (114). The author notes that such a linear and unfragmented narrative generates a “deceptive immediacy” by allowing us to think that one scene led to another as we become “genuine ethical witness[es]” which, in reality, we are not (115). The “classical realist forms of Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs ‘show’ reality to the audience as if it were an unmediated history” (115). Yet, as Eltringham points out, can we be so demanding of fiction to relay accurately the events of a story that “cannot even be imagined”? Drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, Eltringham notes that “historical stories (like individual memory) are always determined by the ideological conditions and social needs of the present. . . . Even at the moment of reproducing the past our imagination remains under the influence of the present social mileu” in which we find ourselves (128). Therefore, should we critique these films for the historical events they portray or how they remember them within a fictitious framework? The author concludes that both films, while giving in to some historical inaccuracy, do encourage audiences to think about this dark, bloody moment in Rwanda’s history. On the one hand, they are perhaps unable to answer Wiesel’s question. But on the other hand, they also remind us that this moment in history is one that should always be remembered. Capturing this idea at the end of his essay, Eltringham suggests that we think about another observation made by Wiesel: “The more I read about [the Holocaust], the less I understand it” (Harry J. Cargas, “An Interview with Elie Wiesel,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 [1], 1986). Thus remembering the historical moment in order to keep it in the discussion becomes imperative.

Maryellen Higgins’s edited volume contains twice the number of chapters as Framing Africa, although many focus on the same themes discussed above. Leading contributors to Hollywood’s Africa focus on the essential question: do Hollywood films primarily give us a “complex of received ideas” (Higgins, 3) about Africa? The fifteen chapters consider films from all over sub-Saharan Africa. As in Framing Africa, the contributors to Hollywood’s Africa provide critiques of films such as Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs, The Last King of Scotland, Black Hawk Down, Red Dust, and Blood Diamond.

Harry Garuba and Natasha Himmelman’s excellent first chapter, “The Cited and the Uncited,” offers a comprehensive framework for the subsequent essays in the volume. Noting that one of the first scenes in The Last King of Scotland focuses on a young white doctor’s spinning a globe to blindly pin a destination on a country he hopes will be “exotic,” the authors link this film to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which “the narrator, Marlow, speaks of his childhood fascination with maps and his longing to visit the blank, unexplored spaces on the maps of the world” (15). Hollywood’s repertoire of films focusing on Africa, thus, is “discursively anchored on similar system[s] of citations . . . building on known image[s] of Africa” (16). Referencing these films and the citations in them that “enable and give authority to each frame, image, or sequence of the film” allows audiences to create “cultural meanings” that are comfortable and, therefore, remain unchallenged (16). Yet, as the authors point out, some of the films considered in the volume, contain “sequences which stand outside this dominant system of citations. . . . These are often puzzling precisely because there is no narrative explanation for them” (16–17). These “uncited” images are based on “the unknown . . . image not anchored on any archive.” There are “rare moments” when the “uncited emerge within [stereotypical] narratives” (17). These are usually housed in not ignorance, but a certain “knowledge regime . . . built on centuries of knowledge production on Africa” (18). Identifying how to read the difference between ignorance and calculated images used to maintain the status quo (the “knowledge regime”) is the focus not only of this chapter, but of many subsequent essays in the volume as well.

Kenneth Harrow’s contribution, “Again, the Darkness: Shake Hands with the Devil,” focuses on deciphering images construed through ignorance about the continent and those of the more calculated variety. Harrow takes issue with several films, notably Michael Caton-Jones’s Shooting Dogs, which he considers “deeply flawed,” especially “in its celebration of the Catholic priesthood, whose actual behavior in the massacre [in Rwanda] was generally the contrary to that presented in the film” (83). Harrow notes that films on Rwanda generally occlude “historical evidence” and end up “muddy[ing] the purity” of any human rights message that the director is hoping to convey. A film such as Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2004), also on the genocide and focusing on the account by Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the U.N. Mission for Rwanda, reveals a “set of expectations of responses that translate into the symbolic code for the human rights film” (85). Harrow notes that what is fundamentally wrong with the human rights film is that its framework constantly casts divisions between good and evil, thus reducing discussion to the lowest common denominator. There is always a “heroic savior” (Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs) who must win out over evil. In reality, as Harrow firmly notes, genocide is never so simplistic or comprehensible.

Dayna Oscherwitz’s chapter, “Bye Bye Hollywood: African Cinema and Its Double in Mahamet Saleh-Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa,” proposes an interesting study of this 1999 film from Chad. Saleh-Haroun’s work is compelling in that it represents “the ‘new’ generation of African filmmakers” currently working on the continent. Bye Bye Africa was also made “outside of the typical funding and production structures most African filmmakers have come to rely on,” notably money from state film industries or the West (242). Saleh-Haroun seeks to avoid the “colonization by images” that is found in many of the Hollywood films discussed above (242). Oscherwitz notes that Saleh-Haroun’s film focuses on his own experience as an immigrant “going back to his native country before he leaves it again for good” (243). The film symbolically details Saleh-Haroun’s grief over the death of his mother, and “Africa as a mother figure,” noted in the work of authors such as Léopold Sedar Senghor, is a metaphor of prominence in the film. The film is thus a “eulogy, both for [Saleh-Haroun’s] mother and for Africa, a means of capturing on film something that, for [the filmmaker], no longer exists” (243). What is interesting about Bye Bye Africa is that the filmmaker is both inside and outside its text, filming as one who comes from “exile or dislocation.” The work thus scrutinizes Saleh-Haroun’s own father’s observation that “he does not make films for Africans, but rather for Westerners” (248) and poses the question: once a filmmaker leaves the continent, can he ever go back and look at it as if he never left? To further probe this question, Saleh-Haroun inserts a home movie made by his friend Garba. This film is the real “African film,” “nothing staged, artificial, or fictional in its content” (249). The beauty of Bye Bye Africa is the film within a film, as “it implies the creation of [a] liminal cinema both in the internal and external worlds [of Africa]” (257). Oscherwitz’s chapter is the last in the volume, thus offering readers an alternative to Hollywood African films. Her essay reveals that there are African filmmakers who are challenging “other African filmmakers” to make films that will counter the “cited images” that have rendered our Western (Hollywood) “knowledge regimes” about the continent so pervasive and unchanging.

Michael O’Riley’s book is well-written, dense in themes and scope, and intellectually challenging. The book “could be considered a compilation of reflections on the process of mapping colonial-era victimizing—its returns, appropriations, and spectacles—in the age of terror” (19). Commenting on films made by both Maghrebi and French filmmakers such as Rachid Bouchareb (Indigènes, 2007) and Michael Haneke (Caché, 2005), the author scrutinizes the themes of victimization, terror, and the colonial tropes that fuel them in films that have been released post 9/11. The author takes to task the now celebrated, coined term “the clash of civilizations” touted by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in his 1992 Foreign Affairs article of the same title and elaborated in the 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Huntington’s work was informed by Bernard Lewis’s earlier 1990 article entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (The Atlantic, Sept. 1). However, these recent views, purporting to show how simply the world can be divided between Muslim and non-Muslim, are rooted in older, colonial texts, such as Basil Mathews’s work on the Middle East (Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations, Kessinger, 1926). Early allusions to the clash date back to the belle epoque, notably France’s colonial enterprise in Algeria. Through the melding of this history of the past and recent present, as well as literary and film theory, O’Riley demonstrates how the trope of “victimization” in the post-9/11 era has been coopted as a “reciprocal form,” oscillating between torture and terrorism. In this reciprocity, “victimization referencing colonial history functions as a central organizing tenet of national and international relations” (1). The works examined in this book “illustrate how reciprocal forms of violence and territorialism . . . operate, and how many of them go further to demonstrate how victimization and the return of colonial history intricately connect to terror,” particularly when they are linked to Arabs, North Africa, and the Middle East (2). Drawing on Edward Said’s work, O’Riley notes that “the reinscription of this aged construction . . . has been a focal point in the relationship between culture and imperialism, one that has enabled the West to view its ‘Other’ as a simultaneously symbiotic and hostile reflection” (102).

The films discussed in O’Riley’s book include The Battle of Algiers, Indigènes (Days of Glory, 2006), Caché, several “beur” films such as Le Gone du Chaâba (1998), some “colonial era” films, notably Pépé le Moko (1937), and finally the contemporary film Babel (2006). The scope of this filmic corpus is impressive in what it represents with respect to O’Riley’s definition of the “hauntings” of colonialism, which vacillate between various camps of vicitimization. Films such as Bouchareb’s critically acclaimed Indigènes, about North Africans conscripted by the French to fight the Germans in France during World War II, work to dismiss Western stereotypes associated with the Arab–Other as cast only in one mold—that of despot, heathen, or barbarian. Other films, however, contribute to the festering of the “open wound” of the colonial enterprise, specifically with respect to Franco-Algerian history. This open wound, described in historical works by the notable postcolonial historian Benjamin Stora, has led to continued anxiety on both sides of the Mediterranean with respect to the legacy of the Franco-Algerian war and the general colonial history of North Africa. The film Caché, directed by French Michal Haneke, dwells on persistent questions emanating from “colonial-era victimization that structures Franco-Maghrebi relations” even in contemporary times (99). Despite the opening up of the wound which this film, in particular, purports to accomplish, French-speaking audiences are drawn to it because of the “cultural cult of fascination with colonial-era victimization” that is rooted in French colonization, particularly the 132 years of the occupation of Algeria (97).

O’Riley ends his masterful analysis by referencing Roland Barthes in the context of the film Babel (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu). Colonial history returns, the author notes, as “symbolically represented in the victimizing shot of an American traveler and its interpretation” (154). The victimization of the American traveler (Cate Blanchett), shot by a stray bullet innocently fired by children herding sheep in the Moroccan desert as her tour bus drives by, is reified as a “punctum[,] . . . a point of recognition,” according to Roland Barthes, that involves “a return of memory . . . that is etched onto the body of the viewer. . . . This point of memory pierces the viewer because it recalls another time frame, a haunting image. The punctum introduces a spectral presence onto the viewing framework” (155). O’Riley deftly links this visual image to another narrative written by Albert Camus in 1957, The Adulterous Woman, which tells the story of a white French couple in a bus in the Algerian desert. The innocent, pristine whiteness of the fragile, Western, heteronormative confronts the challenges of the hostile desert setting. Thus as a colonial image, familiar and comfortable, it persists in the present for audiences as a salient truism. “The North African context is viewed by the outside western gaze as a confusing and dangerous setting where the western viewer might impose his or her cultural vision of the landscape” (153). Thus the symbolism of the “clash of civilizations” between “North Africa and the external ‘Western’ world” is constantly replayed as an enduring, “shared . . . misunderstanding” (154). What we take away from O’Riley’s nuanced and deeply thoughtful work is that these films “all demonstrate that victimization is central to the way we see and create terror” on and off the screen, as we link history, memory, and the present to North Africa (159).

The three volumes considered in this review essay are impressive in their scope and depth, and essential reading for any scholar in film studies. They also would be immensely useful to academics seeking to provide students with a variety of perspectives on contemporary film from and about the continent of Africa.

There is one polemical issue that these volumes raise but do not discuss, and which is, nevertheless, of particular importance when debating issues pertinent to Africa as a whole. This issue has to do with the geographical, linguistic, and ethnic divisions that have consistently defined the continent and, thus, the films made about it. Although both edited volumes, Framing Africa and Hollywood’s Africa after 1994, use the overarching term “Africa” in their titles, they are primarily (except for Dayna Oscherwitz’s chapter in the latter book) discussing films exploring (or made in) “Anglophone” Africa with scripts for the most part written in English. Their settings are principally black African communities, regions, and countries. O’Riley, by contrast, specifically notes that his work engages with topics relevant to films from North Africa with a particular focus on this region’s sociohistorical polemics with France.

The titles of these volumes, thus, engender certain essential questions with reference to how we talk, contextualize, “frame,” and impart “Africa” as a continent. We should be thinking about the question: How do we define “Africa” without blanketing it with one set of values and as one massive geography? The continent is generally divided geographically at the Sahel by academics working in fields as diverse as history, literature, film, and African studies. These divisions are important, yet have been noticeably divisive in annual conferences of the African Studies Association and of the African Literature Association, where often North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya) is virtually absent, even though this region is part of “the continent.” This reviewer therefore would certainly appreciate a more nuanced use of the term “Africa” when referring to the geographical location, particularly in the titles of scholarly works that seek to define issues and contexts associated with the continent. The titles of the two edited volumes, which evoke Africa as an umbrella term, do not tell us on which Africa they are focused. Will it be sub-Saharan? “Black”? East and/or West? South? North? “Arab” Africa? Anglophone? Francophone? The regions of the continent are diverse, yet they share in the fact that they are different and face very specific socioeconomic, political, and cultural hurdles, conflicts, and challenges. It would behoove us to define, even in the very titles of our scholarly editions, the diversity of the region we are discussing. The title Framing Africa, therefore, is misleading, given its focus on films that are Anglophone and only about sub-Saharan Africa. The continent cannot be covered by one umbrella, otherwise even well-meaning scholars may continue to cover the space of Africa with the proverbial blanket-stereotype we try to avoid—as a huge slate on which to write our own definitions.