The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa

by Vlad Dima

Overview

In this original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature, Vlad Dima investigates the way that football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies, and highlights where football and cinema converge and diverge with regard to neocolonial fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Touré, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukouré, and Joseph Gaï Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question requires the exploration of body and identity issues, here through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has visual, aural, and haptic qualities. The neocolonial body is often depicted as suffering and in the process of being flattened or emptied. So frequently do African cinema and literature replicate this hollowed body, all skin as it were, that it becomes the very type of body that defines neocolonialism. Could the body of film—the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin—hold the key to moving into a post-neocolonial era, an era defined by “full” bodies and personal affirmation? This is the question Dima seeks to answer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611863703
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	African Humanities and the Arts
Edition description:	1
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Vlad Dima is a professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on francophone and French cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017) and The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa (2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Pre-Game, Also Known as the Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Beautiful Fantasy 9

Chapter 2 The Beautiful Game 85

Chapter 3 The Beautiful Skin 141

Extra-Time, Also Known as the Conclusion 199

Notes 209

Filmography 229

Bibliography 233

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

Vlad Dima’s dedication to the global and the transnational are evident in this groundbreaking work. He probes African cinema in order to answer
important questions pertaining to representations of sexuality and the body, African identity, femininity, masculinity, and queerness. Dima’s contribution to African film studies encourages readers to think about the films of the postcolonial era that expose the enduring neocolonial relationships that bind Africans in capitalist systems of exploitation.”
—VALÉRIE K. ORLANDO, Professor of French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park

From the Publisher