Contemporary African Cities in Postmillenial African Films

Abstract

This study discusses postmillennial cinema narratives from six African cities: Cairo, Monrovia, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Luanda and Johannesburg. It argues that filmic representations of street life in these cities is an act of self-narration and that it indexes consciousness of Africa’s postmillennial urban citizenship. Within these films, the street is shown as a frontier as well as a shared space that enables the conversation of citizenship narratives in those respective cities. The research straddles two main disciplinary areas: urban social theory and film theory. Basing my arguments on the way Africa’s urban cinematic representations may be comprehended as a blend of both the cinematic form and urban citizenship discourse, I assert that such entanglement is most vivid in the images of the street which, I argue, perform three main roles: exposé, reportage and archival.