'Suddenly the film scene is becoming our scene'! the making and public lives of black-centred films in South Africa (1959-2001)

ABSTRACT Through an examination of the making and public lives of a selection of apartheid and post-apartheid black-centred films in South Africa: Come Back, Africa (1959), u’Deliwe (1975), Mapantsula (1988), and Fools (1997), their contexts of production, circulation, appropriation and engagement, I investigate the role of film in the public life of ideas. While my focus is chiefly on film, I introduce a brief comparator with the television series Yizo Yizo (1999-2001), where I deploy the same methodology. To this end, I ask how these films relate to ongoing contemporary discourses about black identity. To explain the making and extended public lives of the films, I combine elements of public sphere theory, literary theory and film analysis to develop a theoretical model that treats film as a circulating text open to appropriation and engagement over time. The results indicate that in ways that shifted throughout the films’ public lives, their genres, modes of circulation as well as contexts of their appropriation, mediate the manner and extent of their relations to critical public engagements of black identity. I argue that through the combination of its nature as a modern form and its specific generic attributes, with the conditions and circumstances of its circulation and engagement, film stimulates critical public engagements of certain types. Film achieves what I have called public critical potency, when its content directly or otherwise, resonates with contemporary social and political struggles. Through its public critical potency, which is the capacity of film to stimulate critical public engagements, film demonstrates its importance in the public life of ideas. However, film also has the potential to fail in that respect. As a result, the margin between its success and potential for failure to achieve public critical potency, makes precarious, the role and status of film in the public life of ideas. In examining film as a circulating text over time, the thesis challenges approaches that investigate the public sphere of film solely in terms of genre and cinematic spectatorship. In the process, it has engaged the concepts of ‘film’ and ‘public’ within film studies in a way that recognizes its wide reach and extensive role in the public sphere. In the final analysis, the thesis is instructive with regard to the ways in which film may or may not relate to the public sphere in repressive and post-repressive societies in particular, and in modernity in general

The Textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical

In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text. There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents. The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers), Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more accurately.1 Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives, remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical enquiry.” 2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective (“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states. “Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than) fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Afric