USA Africa Dialogue Series - FW: SACOMM: CFP Cinema in East Africa, Journal of African Cinemas

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From: Keyan Tomaselli [TOMASELL@ukzn.ac.za]

Subject: SACOMM: CFP Cinema in East Africa, Journal of African Cinemas

Special issue, Journal of African Cinemas

Theme: Cinema in East Africa

This special issue will examine how the emerging local film industries in East Africa are overcoming the burden of colonial and foreign filmmaking.

East Africa is broadly interpreted as the region is variably defined by historical and linguistic links, geography or geopolitics. We welcome articles dealing with film in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, which comprise the African Great Lakes region, all members of the East African Community (EAC). We will also include Malawi, due to its geographical and linguistic proximity to the other Anglophone countries in the region, and a shared experience of British colonization. Articles dealing with the fledgling film industries of the horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia), as well as the islands of the Indian Ocean (including Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, and Réunion) are also invited.

Today a range of innovative developments and creative filmmaking trends can be observed in these countries, with contemporary fiction films that address relevant local themes and stories, exploring the recent past and current socio-political situations.

New genres are being explored as well, such as science fiction and fantasy. .Science fiction allows filmmakers to speculate about possible futures of Africa in defiance of stereotypical representations of the "dark continent". Many East African countries have been through turbulent periods of political and social instability in the postcolonial era, and film has become an important tool in dealing with the aftermath of conflict and trauma and opening up a space for telling previously untold or suppressed stories.

In East Africa the video-film genre (adopted from and inspired by Nigeria's hugely popular and prolific Nollywood industry) most often take the form of dramas that deal with local preoccupations and themes (including religion, relationships and family matters), although these video-film industries are also diversifying into other genres.

In addition to film distribution and Internet exhibition, on DVD and VCD, on TV and in cinemas, film festivals offer important platforms for the exhibition of East African cinema.

We envision that this special issue will include a wide range of articles and interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical approaches, including analyses of individual films; discussions of cinematic themes, styles and genres; training, production, distribution and exhibition issues; and in-depth studies of East African film audiences. We are interested in articles that explore new theoretical and analytical paradigms for studying East African cinema, including postcolonial theory, African feminist theory and gender studies, transnationalism, and audience and reception studies.

We also welcome articles that discuss contemporary East African cinema in terms of styles, themes, narrative devices and aesthetics. Articles on genre might look at how contemporary East African cinema draws on existing genres of world cinema, while also creating new genres and new approaches to narrative and storytelling, specific to the socio-historical and –cultural contexts of the films. Articles dealing with East African film audiences might explore spectatorship modes and sites of consumption, as well as how the psychoanalytical "gaze" of Western film theory can be replaced with and reconfigured by the gaze and agency of local audiences.

Speaking of the West African video revolution, film scholar Jonathan Haynes (in Saul & Austen, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, 2010: 13) has called for more rigorous theoretical approaches to analyzing the low-budget video-film, and this call is also applicable to the younger, but no less prolific, East African video revolution: "It is time to roll out the full disciplinary apparatus of film studies and apply it to the video films", Haynes states, and we hope that some articles submitted for this special issue would attempt this.

We welcome proposals for articles dealing with contemporary film in East Africa, including but not limited to the themes described above as well as the following sub-themes:


• Socio-historical studies of the development of indigenous film industries in East Africa

• New theoretical, historical and critical approaches to East African cinema, exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic and political implications of East African film

• The legacy of documentary filmmaking in the region (including critical assessments of the current proliferation of issue-based, donor-funded documentary filmmaking)

• Comparative or individual analyses of films, with a focus on genres, themes, styles and aesthetics

• The rise of the video-film industries in East Africa

• Film exhibition and distribution (including DVD and home-viewing, video parlours, festivals, cinemas, mobile cinemas, television and the Internet)

• Film audiences and cinema-going culture: Who is being addressed in cinema from the region? What do local audiences watch and where/how do they watch films? What are the differences between urban and rural audiences?

• Film festival culture and audiences

• Film production training, including the rise of film schools in locations such as Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Nairobi, Kigali and Kampala

• Film production and funding (including independent film, national film and international co-productions)

• Film policy, censorship, government regulation and the establishment (or lack of) of national film centres

• Critical discussions of East Africa as a location for foreign filmmaking

• The digital revolution and its influence on local filmmaking in the region (including the use of the Internet, digital and mobile phone technology in film production, distribution and consumption)

• We also welcome reviews of films and interviews with East African filmmakers

Please submit Abstracts and Metadata to Guest Editor;

Name and affiliation
Title of article
Mailing address
Email
Bio (100-120 words)
Abstract (300 words)
Keywords (6 in low case, one under the other)

Dr Lizelle Bisschoff, lizelle.bisschoff@glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:lizelle.bisschoff@glasgow.ac.uk>
Research Fellow, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Journal of African Cinemas Home Page
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=158/

Due date for abstracts: 30 April 2013
Due date for full articles: 30 Sept 2013


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