Teresa Hoefert de Turégano

The core of this work is an analysis of cinematic representation in relation to a politics of production and to a received body of knowledge on Africa. It explores the process of transnational, translational and negotiated identities within differentiated structures of power and hierarchy in a global system. Burkinabè fiction film is used to consider an asymmetric relationship between France and Burkina Faso and by extension between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. The analytical framework revolves around a notion of external affiliation, which is seen as a process of articulation of power and knowledge within cinematic space. It functions infrastructurally through the financing, production, distribution and exhibition of Burkinabè film, as well as through the body of knowledge that constitutes an idea of Africanness, as expressed through the modernity/tradition dichotomy, exoticism, the supernatural, postcolonial, and national identities. These themes serve as context for the film analysis. The study reveals various patterns of production and two main filmic tendencies. The power relations and the knowledge that Europe deploys do not result in a determined or objectified dependency on screen. Within this framework we see how Europe’s knowledge of Africa enters into relation with Africa’s knowledge of itself and produces a negotiated new Africanness.