on planned and unplanned occasions, where various people met, exchanged, disagreed, shared and collaborated. Some exchanges were once-off conversations, some had to be revisited and some are still ongoing. The common thread was that all of the participants were active in one or several aspects of filmmaking.
It is almost a cliché to say that women need to tell their own stories, that women’s voices need to be heard, that Africa has numerous stories and experiences that have to be shown. Yet the cliché holds a kernel of truth. We would add: these stories and experiences not only need to be shown, but to be shown by women, on their own terms.
Filmmakers often describe themselves as storytellers, though the modes of storytelling may come in different forms and present unique experiences. And theorists often position themselves as interpreters on the outside of these stories. If filmmaking is about storytelling, this book is also about storytelling, and its stories are ongoing. But it is also about the conditions of storytelling and it is these conditions that partly shaped the process of how we decided to put these voices together and how we chose the framework within which to share them.
Given the focus on filmmakers who identify as female and who live and work in different countries in Africa, a feminist framework to interpret these women’s experiences and to ‘read’ their filmic work was an obvious choice. Africa as a geo-political location is also a space of collective and shared memories within which conflict and post-conflict narratives emerge. These narratives of historical and personal traumas are further transferred between generations and inform the subject content for healing and restitutive politics across the African continent. Film is a vehicle for releasing the repressed and the silenced, for remembering, altering and transforming narratives that might otherwise be forgotten. These processes are not only highly gendered but also racialised and infused with anti-/post-/neo-colonial legacies. There are no longer any simple divisions between a global South and North – imperial gaze regimes and relations are steadily reproduced, opposed, subverted and further altered based on historical-political conditions. Therefore a third aspect of the framework for the book was an analysis of how gender, racial and cultural identity (either self-determined or imposed) intersect with the politics of representation. The complex socio-political landscape within which women work (inclusive of their experiences), the work they produce and the reception of their work shapes the through-line of the book.
The circumstances that fund the telling of these stories provides context for understanding what stories are told and under what conditions. Festivals provide a further context for interpretation since these circuits of exhibition function as a framing device for the stories and their storytellers. While this book brings together women filmmakers who tell stories, it also positions these stories in the context of the interpreters, the theorists who search for representations and meaning, which reveal something of the women themselves, their contexts and their practices.
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‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe
Historically, theorists are seen to be separate from storytellers and filmmakers. Filmmakers and theorists are each circumscribed by the language paradigms of their practice (film language in the case of filmmakers and theoretical discourse in the case of interpreters) and one is often seen as impenetrable to the other.
These specific positions are not held apart in this book; instead they are brought together in conversation with each other. At times this conversation is a collision of ideas and at other times it is a contestation of experiences and a desire to be heard from the unique point of where these women are located.
What does it mean for academics to be in conversation with creative practitioners, and how do practitioners involved in reading films as texts interpret the curatorial strategies that frame films at film festivals? Film practitioners and theorists are assumed to speak different languages. Words that have a cadence and value in one context are understood and appropriated wholly differently in another. In a few instances filmmaking is also explored as a theoretical interrogation where filmmakers are also theorists, and theorists are also filmmakers, creatively engaged intellectuals searching through the medium for ways that will challenge historically inspired modes of working or storytelling. For African women this also means challenging knowledge paradigms from within patriarchal and colonial legacies.
The current African reorientation towards itself reveals the significant role women play in this self-definition of Africa. This includes the gradual recognition, outside Africa, of the need to engage differently with the continent that has been referred to as the ‘heart of darkness’. Increasingly Africans are approached as strategic partners and collaborators. Both aspects, the self-reorientating and a less paternalistic Northern approach, require and produce alternative image productions about and within Africa. This forms a crucial construction site, where women play a key role.
This book of texts and conversations is not a mere static receptacle. It explores not only the conditions of making films in post-colonial Africa with a gender-sensitive and feminist analysis, it also discusses the complexities of individual and/or collective positioning when art meets politics and vice versa. In part analytical, in part inspired by reception studies addressing how audiences view films, the contributions seek to theorise the lines of insider-outsider positions. It further documents and intervenes in an ongoing process from the particular angle of feminism and trauma studies in relation to cultural production. It invites the exploration of different and sometimes contradictory approaches towards social and political change from varied positions, depending on the contributors, their experiences and their geo-political histories.
The overall commitment of contributors to this project was explicable precisely because it gave opportunities for women to voice their opinions and their experiences in a context that would be heard in a refreshed way. They worked to ensure that their voices would be heard via these pages by new audiences, different from those of their films.
There were many tensions with which we had to grapple in the overall process: tensions between the analytical languages, concepts and theories we use in trying to understand, to represent and sometimes to intervene in realities that are often perceived as too complex or too simple. In other words: tensions between our scholarly tools organised in various disciplines – post-colonial studies, film studies, critical theory, feminist theory and practice, developmental studies and so forth – on the one hand, and the lived experiences of diverse people – women, men and differently identified practitioners – on the other.
We also tried to transcend some of the confines of individualised knowledge production and so we assembled not only a broad variety of perspectives, but also a wide spectrum of positionalities. This is further reflected in the diversity of text genres and writing styles in these pages. People contributed to this cacophonic counter-canon through writing and through conversations, some from the inside, some from the outside, and some inside-out of academia and filmmaking. Consequently, this book challenges notions of what it means to be positioned as a woman in a man’s world when engaged with cultural and intellectual production, both within academia and within the ‘industries’ of filmmaking, festivals and art production. These strategic and highly political questions transcend seemingly different environments: How do I (as a woman) position myself towards inequality? As an individual or as part of an imagined (heterodox) community of people all navigating and/or battling intersecting structures of discrimination?
Feminist theory contributes to a growing intellectual uncertainty about how most adequately to explain or interpret human experiences. However, knowledge production within the normative framework of academic publishing still meets deviations (such as speaking from the position of a subjective first person narrator) with scepticism. We believed it was important to straddle this by generating alternative opportunities and by acknowledging that relevant knowledge production is in fact taking place also in contexts outside of institutional frameworks. It is exactly the arrangement
