A Ghost is Disturbing Africa: The Evolution of Black Consciousness from Masks to Ghosts in Contemporary African Cinema

Authors : Yusuf Ziya Gökçek, Muzaffer Musab Yılmaz

Pages : 198-211

Doi:10.31122/sinefilozofi.1446248

View : 179 | Download : 178

Publication Date : 2024-12-27

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :From 1960s to the present, colonial, postcolonial, social problems and migration have been among the dominant themes of Sub-Saharan African cinema. Today, among the sub-Saharan African filmmakers who grew up in the diaspora and shot their first films in their continent, there are those who use the sixty-year-old theme of African cinema by associating the place and characters with the ghost theme in their films. Mati Diop who was born in Senegal, living in France and Mario Bastos who was born in Angola but professionally trained in USA transform their cities into a dystopian universe through the ghost phenomenon and establish national allegories through their films Atlantique (2019) and Air Conditioner (2020). Although the relationship between time and space in these films is arranged in accordance with realistic codes, the extraordinariness of the narratives makes the current political and social inequality visible. It is also seen that African filmmakers who grew up in the diaspora did not put political inequality into a single cinematic genre, they try to hybridize it. In the study, the descriptive analysis method was used within the notion of Jacques Derrida\\\'s hauntology concept to analyse whether there is a parallelism between the political discourse of films and film type, which are hybridization strategies directors apply. It has been seen that the films show situations such as income injustice and inequality in the post-colonial period based on basic principles borrowed from science fiction and horror cinema.
Keywords : Postkolonyal Afrika, Senegal Sineması, Angola Sineması, Hayaletbilim, Afrika Sineması