"Bye Bye Africa"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Chad-born director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun?s 1999 docu-fiction "Bye Bye Africa" which allows the audience to see into modern-day North-Central Africa, revealing and commenting on its complex social, political and cultural issues. It discusses how more importantly than serving as a voyeuristic peek into the world of the Other for curious European audiences, "Bye Bye Africa" effectively gives a voice to Black Africans themselves, a people virtually voiceless in the dominant media. It analyzes how the film achieves this counter-normative goal through providing a succinct history of Black African cinema and the ideological/theoretical/ cultural debates much of it is based upon, followed by a close reading of the film itself through the philosophical lens this historical overview provides.

From the Paper:

"Another way in which African cinema often wholly breaks dominant conventions is in the realm of language, by making use of native African language. This is a liberating change from most European depictions of Third World cultures, where ?[t]he languages spoken by Third World peoples are often reduced to an incomprehensible jumble of background murmurs, while major "native" characters are inconsistently obliged to meet the colonizer on the colonizer's linguistic turn? (Stam and Spence 240). Unfortunately in the case of Bye Bye Africa, language is one of the few aspects in which it supports the prevailing ideology: in its heavy use of the French language."

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