Letter to the Defunct Cineaste

Kenneth W. Harrow

2.

What are the key elements? Can anything be rescued from the political and psychoanalytical work we have seen develop in Film and Feminist Studies over the past decades? If we leave aside the brilliant studies in material culture already initiated by Karin Barber, augmented by the work of Achille Mbembe, Ann Stoler, Fred Cooper, Paul Landau, Deborah Kaspin, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Johannus Fabian, Luis White, etc., there would still be room to ask about the psychodynamics of the relations between subject and object, of the patriarchy and its anxieties over loss and decline, the ascension of women to new positions of power, and the radical reconfiguring of the position of children in society. The conventions of a symbolic order guaranteed by the autonomous subject have now been disrupted to the point where the foundations of fantasy have begun to tremble and lose their moorings, and the imaginary has started its long surge forward. In Hitchcockean terms, as Žižek has put it, the invisible McGuffin has gradually been supplanted by the hypermaterial presence of the monstrous. And, in all this, the autonomous subject has morphed through states of heteronomy to the disenfranchised condition of the abiku.

The material remains, then, as we always knew we had to address it, but now expanded to include those qualities of the object whose strangeness resists coherence, just as the ego resists the comforting gestures of méconnaissance in the solitary embrace of the imago. The material is there, in an African world with all its social framework, but how in excess of that scaffolding. The global capitalist system has invaded the very texture of the objects on which we now focus our gazes.

The material, social relations, the social processes of production and reproduction first considered in terms of capitalist class systems, have now shifted under the weight of globalized economies, and the results include the shift away from patriarchy and its castrating cut. Now it is the mom, even a sort of soccer mom, making her living in the urban economies, jousting with her competitors for power and money. That is your vision in Faat Kine, to be sure, but also that of Fanta Nacro in Puk Nini. Less obviously the case, yet still indicative of a new paradigm for the woman, we can consider Si Gueriki, or Faraw. These have been followed by a new generation of films dealing with the rising, undisciplined figure of the child, with urban street children and child soldiers. Fanta Nacro’s latest film, Night of Truth, takes us to edge of this point, but the TV dramas like Petit sergent by Adama Roamba (a series of 12 episodes) in Burkina have passed that threshold.

The material figured in the landscape, at one time like a baobab or a steer to be driven to market, now a careening van racing through the forest, as in Clando; or it is a dark street at night, in Aristotle’s Plot, with the gangsters, tsotsis really, ready for the cinematics of staging a heist best described as a copy of a scene from a film noir. There are no more invisible McGuffins to be overcome by lovers meant for each other, and death no longer comes calling as the Not-I bird. Rather we see the heavy equipment leveling the field at the end of Hyènes as Colobane undergoes the rapid transformation from sleep burg to noisy quartier in a city that never sleeps.

In short, it will be the material culture we expect to surround us in the soaps, in the melodrama of a city in the midst of the agonies of globalization, with stuffed armchairs, sofas, and refrigerators – the fast cars of an Argentinian melodrama, to be seen every day at 5:00 p.m. Preparation for dinner just have to wait, and indeed the dinner hour has shifted accordingly in the quartiers of the city.

With every material encounter the ego is reformulated. Why should attention to this issue be at the expense of our engagement? What had once been framed in terms of false consciousness and conscientization has now moved outward to the frame of the knowledge-producing apparatus and its subjects. The ego is always ensconced in the materiality of the institutions, the ISAs, which interpellate it, although here as well we can say that the foundations have been shaken. Whatever State Apparatuses were of concern to us in the past, those of the newly independent and all too soon corrupted, despotic suns of independence, or their neocolonial metropole, have now been radically altered by a landscape filled with globalized institutions and relatively disempowered states. The failures of Somalia to form a coherent national government, for example, can be attributed to US interventions – both directly and indirectly through Ethiopia – which have little to do with the propping up of dictators like Mobutu in the past. The attention now given to surveillance of the entire Sahara in the name of fighting terrorism is radically different from past indifference to the entire region. And the enormous expansion of the wild gangsterism of unrestrained neoliberal capitalism, as in the arms for natural resources trade, has nothing to do with the subordination of national governments to contracts with Western monopolies sustained by the US or European national governments.

It is not a deflection from politics to ask how these conditions mark cultural representations, especially in terms of the subject, of material objects, or of the relations to material conditions and to patriarchal institutions. We have always asked these questions, but in too narrow an orbit, our eyes fixed on the dreams of national liberation as if its meaning were self-evident, as if it had produced its own purity in the spirit of liberation. If we are more realistic and more modest in holding to these concerns over subjectivity and material and social processes, it is that the theories which have developed with film studies and feminism, along with Williams’s reworking of Marxist presuppositions, have permitted us to rethink the parameters of the political. Not to abandon African realities, but to account for the changes they have undergone.

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