Cosmopoetics of decolonization, cosmopoetics of the common: inversion of the gaze, return to origins and forms of relation to the land in african cinemas

Abstract

Working on the hypothesis that the historical emergence of African cinemas and their contemporaneity are inseparable from a claim of the right to look, to narrate and to imagine the world, this article seeks to establish a conceptual framework for the formulation of a history of the forms of imagination of the common in African cinemas. In this history yet to be written, which belongs to the broader research program of creating an atlas of cosmopoetics, one must acknowledge the inaugural meaning of the gesture of inverting the colonial gaze, on the one hand, in the context of the emergence of African cinemas between the 1950s and the 1960s, and of the inventive return to origins, on the other hand, which makes possible the participation of film in the diversity of historical processes which characterize the postcolonial condition, in the following decades (consolidation of national states, pan-Africanist aspirations, Négritude, revolutionary internationalism, the cosmopolitics of capitalism and human rights, afropolitanism etc.). In this way, it is possible to recognize the aesthetic and political task of decolonization as African cinemas’ inaugural cosmopoetic horizon, between the inversion of the colonial gaze and the inventive return to origins, in the films Afrique sur Seine (Mamadou Sarr, Paulin Vieyra, 1955), Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1967) and Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973). In more recent films, such as La vie sur terre (Abderrahmane Sissako, 1998), Terra sonâmbula (Teresa Prata, 2007) and Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009), it becomes evident that there is a trend towards the displacement of the cosmopoetics of decolonization by a cosmopoetics of the common, which is linked to the theme of the relation to the land, in its polysemy: fatherland, homeland, expatriation, exile, waste land.