2024-2025 Undergraduate Academic Catalog

CHIST 3600 Africa in Film

This course critically examines the history of Africa in film as represented through a wide variety of eras and film genres: early twentieth-century historical epics and biopics; jungle empire, and adventure films of the 1930s-1950s; mid-twentieth-century newsreels, documentaries, and ethnographic films; the rise of indigenous African cinema in the 1960s-1980s, and its more recent rebirth in Nollywood"; as well as twenty-first-century Hollywood "broken Africa" dramas. These films will be analyzed not only in terms of the African histories and subjects they encompass but also with respect to the historical and geographical contexts in which they were produced and the broader impact they had on perceptions of Africa and its past.

Credits

3

Prerequisite

CLITR 1100, OR one 1000- or 2000-level CHIST or CHUMS course. Fulfills Global Perspectives requirement