AFRICAN & AFRICAN AMERICAN CINEMA: PARALLEL MOVEMENTS

Catalog description

This course tracks parallel movements in the historical development of African and African American cinema from their origins to the present. These two cinematic traditions and practices share similarities in how the film medium was appropriated as an instrument not only to strike back at stereotypical representations of the black subject in colonial and Hollywood films, but also to present Afrocentric or 'black' storytelling and aesthetics--black cinema. As independent cinema, African and African American audiovisual productions have also adopted (dis)similar strategies in establishing connections to dominant cinema through their respective modes of production and distribution.