Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2012, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation explores how films about Africa depict contemporary economic globalization. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which narrative styles and visual imagery are used to project themes of economic globalization and how these styles are ideologically framed to reflect the neoliberal economic policies in Africa. By concentrating upon the ways in which these films represent globalization, this project breaks from the popular tendency in discussions related to cinema and globalization in Africa to apply a political economy approach that focuses mainly on the socioeconomic and political structures of film industry in Africa. Accordingly, this dissertation generates a dialogue between the art of cinema and the critical discourse on globalization through a theoretical framework informed by African cinema, social realist cinema, and Third Cinema. This dialogue is developed as the dissertation responds to two posed basic questions: What socioeconomic realities in regard to economic globalization are presented in contemporary films about Africa? And, secondly, what cinematic modalities are used to narrativize these socioeconomic realities? The study focuses on four films: Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1992); Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006); Darwin's Nightmare (Hubert Sauper, 2004); End of the Rainbow (Robert Nugent, 2007). It includes an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction provides a brief overview of the study and a literature review. Chapter one offers a discussion on the Hyenas focusing on the violence associated with the implementation of the neoliberal economic policies in Africa. Chapter two is an analysis of Bamako centering on the destructive nature of the economic globalization. Chapter three provides an examination of documentary film depiction of the agent of economic globalization as reflected in End of the Rainbow and Darwin's Nightmare. The conclusion finalizes the discussion with some recurring insights reg (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Gillespie PhD (Committee Chair); Andrea Frohne PhD (Committee Member); Marina Peterson PhD (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation explores the role of African media in shaping Africa's image through both the analysis of newspapers over the course of the 2014 Ebola crisis and an exploration of African films. This methodology redeploys aspects of Africa's (in)visibility in global politics and discourse on representation in geopolitics. Placing African film and media organizations at the center of analysis in this study is vital, as they add diversity of voices to the conversation about Africa's image in the media. The dissertation looks at how Africa is framed as perpetually “in crisis.” Specifically, the research engages analysis of African film and media depictions under the premise of crises to advance Africa's visual culture and representation. I am interested in exploring how coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in The Inquirer, a major English newspaper in Liberia, compares with that in the New York Times coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Likewise, I explore how African cinema frames and represents crisis through three films – Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975); Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009); and Les Saignantes (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005). I argue that African films speak to the possibility of positive anticipated outcomes ignored by western scholars, and, therefore, possess the agency to decolonize minds. For instance, Pumzi and Les Saignantes offer an outlook on Africa's challenges and possibilities through newly imagined futures. Precisely, the selected films first address Africa's crisis in relation to the political, economic, and environmental struggle as well as gender discourses and, second, offer a prescription of development and progress. How do African filmmakers and media personnel, through their various creative works, reconstruct Africa's global identity? Finally, I advance that this research gives voice to how Africa frames crisis. This dissertation interrogates an unbalanced global power structure that has been typically Eurocentric. Taking an opposing pos (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrea Frohne (Committee Chair); Erin Schlumpf (Committee Co-Chair); Steve Howard (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Literature; African Studies; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; Communication; Comparative Literature; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This study investigates the use of mobility as a creative style used by writers and filmmakers to represent the deterioration in the socio-economic and political circumstances of post-independence Africa. It makes a scholarly contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by introducing mobility as a new method for understanding film and literature. Increasingly, scholars in the social sciences are finding it important to examine mobility and its relationship with power and powerlessness among groups of people. This dissertation expands on the current study by applying it to the arts. It demonstrates how filmmakers and writers use mobility as a creative style to address issues such as economic globalization, international migration, and underdevelopment. Another significant contribution of this dissertation is that it introduces a new perspective to the debate on African migration. The current trend is for migrants to be seen in the light of vulnerability and powerlessness. This project presents the position that migration is also empowering in the sense that people sometimes can revolt against an unfavorable situation by leaving. Theoretically, this study relies to a large extent on Cresswell's (2006) argument that motion can be regarded as mobility, if it occurs physically and has a meaning to it. Thus, the dissertation seeks to find answers to two principal questions. First, how does mobility fit in with the creative styles commonly used by postcolonial artists? Since mobility ensures fluidity in bodily displacement, its use in the creative arts offers a sense of narrative omnipresence through which postcolonial artists can present their audiences with an intimate knowledge of the socio-economic and political realities of a place (Africa). Secondly, this study examines what the selected filmmakers and writers consider as the challenges to African development. In addition, this project assesses how these artists differ in their use of mobility to represent t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Committee Chair); Arthur Hughes (Committee Member); Michael Gillespie (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; African Studies; Film Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, African-American and African Studies

The mass media industry as a hegemonic entity has played a vital role in displaying fallacious accounts of black life. Grounded in ideas from scholars like Richard Schechner, Patricia Ticineto, Joseph Roach and Sara Ahmed, this research is a critique of the ways in which memory, and its possible manifestations, plays in non-blacks' (specifically whites) interpretation, motivation, and perception of stereotypical visual portrayals of blackness. The focus will be on how the continuing phenomenon of stereotyping blackness in the 20th and 21st centuries is perpetuated in child-targeted feature-length animations with animal characters. I argue that the possible furtive and/or involuntary visual manifestations of “black identity” in animation have their sources in a white historical memory that clings to the desire to maintain whiteness. This work demonstrates how ideas of blackness in white memory were not solely constructed from the imaginations of producers of mainstream culture. Rather black stereotypes are the result of a combination of black protest against negative portrayals, blacks as accomplices in perpetuating their negative stereotypes, and whites' imagined ways of blackness. Following the work of Anna Everett and Robin Kelly and commentary from Bert Williams and George Walker, the perpetuation of whiteness through imagined black identities in media outlets does not take into account the ways in which blacks think of and present themselves within black communities, the ways blacks display their identity outside the constraints of white imagination, or how blacks openly or discreetly oppose stereotypical caricatures. However, the change in the portrayal of black people after the Civil Rights Movement (1945-1964) is the result of the powerful black collective voice influencing change in nefarious deceptions of African-Americans in media outlets. This change, according to Donald Bogle, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, however, simply gave new faces to old ca (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Horace Newsum PhD (Committee Chair); Maurice Stevens PhD (Committee Member); Kenneth Goings PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; American Studies; Black History; Gender; Mass Media; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Motion Pictures; Philosophy; Social Structure; Womens Studies