Framing Africa ― Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema

This collection of essays by American and British writers (with one Dutch contributor) looks at the portrayal of Africa in contemporary Hollywood-style films. The language is suitable for non-academic as well as academic readers. All the contributors have experience studying or working in sub-Saharan Africa, and use it to speak to the ways these films revise old myths about Africa or create different ones for mostly non-African viewers. Where in the past the stories of Africa in Hollywood movies tended to show the "dark continent" as savage, natural, and hostile, recent films for the same market tend to define Africa as savage, political, and tragic. South Africa, once the repository of horrors for liberal viewers, now becomes the repository of hope. The essays look at The Last King of Scotland, Black Hawk Down, The Constant Gardener, Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs, Red Dust, and Clint Eastwood's South African soccer film Invictus. Contributors belong to the same cultures as the filmmakers but have known the actual people, places or situations used in the films. They are part of a tradition of post-colonial conversation among the former colonizers. The editor offers an introduction, and each essay concludes with notes, a bibliography, and filmography. A book that fills a gap, both for educated general readers who are interested in learning more about how the real experience of Americans and Europeans in Africa compares with what we see at the multiplex, and for students and scholars of Hollywood film. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Nigel Eltringham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He has published extensively on the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, conducting research in Rwanda, among the Rwandan diaspora in Europe and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha Tanzania).