This panel explores issues bearing on screen-to-screen transfers in African cinema. What is the internal logic of remediation at play in autographic remakes like Raoul Peck’s “Lumumba” cycle, or the transgeneric blowup of Mati Diop’s documentary short, Atlantics (2009) into its full feature counterpart, Atlantic (2019)? How do African filmmakers engage with “classics” of African cinema, as with Touki Bouki in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleils (2007) and Kofi Ofosu Yeboah’s Public Toilet Africa (2021)? How is a classic figure like Fanon made and remade through repeated cinematic engagements with his legacy, as if each film were an integral part of a multigeneric system of communicating vessels?
The panelists will address these and other topics, including the tense, fraught relation between adaptations and remakes, popular Nollywood reboots like Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, Glamour Girls, and their wide-ranging implications for the ever-expanding “canon” of African cinema in the post-celluloid age.
Please submit abstracts to El Hadji Diop (ediop@macalester.edu) by September 12.
