Examines African cinema of the nationalist era within the context of contemporary major Euro-American film trends. It argues that the aesthetic diversification of African cinema can be traced as far back as the nationalist era.

Analyzing art house films from the African continent and the African diaspora, this book showcases a new generation of auteurs with African origins from political, aesthetic, and spectatorship perspectives.
- Focuses on art house cinema and discusses commercial African cinema.
- Enlarges our understanding of African film to include thematic and aesthetic influence.
- Highlights aesthetic and political aspects including racial identity, women's issues, and diaspora.

Highlighting what is melodramatic, flashy, low, and gritty in the characters, images, and plots of African cinema, Kenneth W. Harrow uses trash as the unlikely metaphor to show how these films have depicted the globalized world. Rather than focusing on topics such as national liberation and postcolonialism, he employs the disruptive notion of trash to propose a destabilizing aesthetics of African cinema. Harrow argues that the spread of commodity capitalism has bred a culture of materiality and waste that now pervades African film. He posits that a view from below permits a way to understand the tropes of trash present in African cinematic imagery.

Investigates Hollywood's colonial film legacy in the post-apartheid era, and contemplates what has changed in the West's representations of Africa. Provides analyses by academics and activists in the fields of African studies, English, film and media studies, international relations, and sociology across continents.

From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture.

Brings together important historical documents, contemporary testimonies and critical essays. Film-makers, scholars and critics detail their responses to, and experiences of, the challenges of cinema across the African continent.