In search of Africa

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

In search of Africa

Manthia Diawara

Harvard University Press, 1998

  • : alk. paper

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-282) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

"There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidime Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me". This text gives the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and for an Africa struggling to find its future. In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returned to Guinea, 32 years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is working on a documentary about Sekou Toure, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that had gone by, Diawara expected to be welcomed as an insider, and was shocked to discover that he was not. The Africa that Diawara found was not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither was it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidime Laye led Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests the solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies.

Table of Contents

  • Part 1 Sartre and African modernism: in my home
  • Williams Sassine on Afro-pessimism
  • situation. Part 2 Richard Wright and modern Africa: Cemoko's Sekou Toure
  • return narratives Djibril Tamsir Niane's Sundiata Salif Keita's Mandjou
  • Afro-kitsch and Woodstock in Bamako Toumani Diabate - a Kora master
  • situation. Part 3 Malcolm X - conversionists versus culturalists: the shape of the future
  • modernity is in evil forest
  • culture and nationalism as resistance to globalization
  • the markets in West Africa and the devaluation of the CFA franc
  • how to compete
  • finding Sidime Laye
  • Africa's art of resistance
  • blinded by my loss
  • the curse of the masks
  • the Fang Byeri
  • statue as primitive art
  • Cheri Samba - the stereotype strikes back
  • Laye's song of resistance
  • Sidime Laye
  • one year later
  • situation. Part 4 Homeboy cosmopolitan: the homeboy and the myth of Cain
  • the black man in bondage - the construction of mobility in "Superfly" and "Shaft"
  • Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It"
  • the hood in Spike Lee's cinema
  • homeboys and the reclaiming of the stereotype in black film
  • toward a new common ground and mentality.

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