Filmic Imaginaries and Myths from Nigeria and Senegal: Exploring Representational Tropes of Africa and Africans in Three Films

Abstract

This study seeks to explore the ways in which three prominent films: Tatu (2017), Atlantics (2019), and The Lost Okoroshi (2019) imagine and mythologise Senegalese and Nigerian life. The investigation is concerned with how cinematic imaginaries confront issues of identity within the context of the African post-colonial situation and globalized Western cultural hegemony. It is driven by the premise that all artistic works produced within a specific geo- sociocultural milieu are telling of the values and ideologies espoused by that particular geo- specificity. Cultural artifacts such as films made within specific socio-cultural contexts are iterative orchestrations of the ways in which those cultures imagine themselves. I shift attention away from Western filmic excess to African-centric visual modalities as I attempt to excavate cinematic imaginaries of Nigeria and Senegal. In doing this, I lean heavily on the theory of the social imaginary in its analysis of the ways in which filmic imaginaries render various aspects of African life and how such renditions situate themselves alongside hegemonic discourses about the continent. Do they counter, decentre or perhaps augment Western thought? What unique localised iterations and representational possibilities do they proffer in relation to African indigeneities and regional filmic lexicographies? This study made use of mixed research methods in the form of content analysis and multimodal analysis. I proceed to demonstrate that these films do not represent the African imaginary in totality but are bound to values and ideologies that are idiosyncratic to their cultural and topographical positioning. In their temporal representations of Nigeria and Senegal, the films deploy the notion of hauntology to depict the past as a spectral force that destabilizes the present, exposing its vulnerabilities and questioning its claims to progress or coherence. The haunting of the present by the past underscores anxieties that underpin visions of the future. These temporal representations communicate an approach towards decolonial temporalities.