Description: In this original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature, Vlad Dima investigates the way that football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies, and highlights where football and cinema converge and diverge with regard to neocolonial fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question requires the exploration of body and identity issues, here through the metaphor of skin. The neocolonial body is often depicted as suffering and in the process of being flattened or emptied. So frequently do African cinema and literature replicate this hollowed body, all skin as it were, that it becomes the very type of body that defines neocolonialism. Could the body of film hold the key to moving into a post-neocolonial era? This is the question Dima seeks to answer.
Brief description: Vlad Dima is a professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on francophone and French cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (2017) and The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa (2020).
Review Quotes: "Vlad Dima's dedication to the global and the transnational are evident in this groundbreaking work. He probes African cinema in order to answer
important questions pertaining to representations of sexuality and the body, African identity, femininity, masculinity, and queerness. Dima's contribution to African film studies encourages readers to think about the films of the postcolonial era that expose the enduring neocolonial relationships that bind Africans in capitalist systems of exploitation."
--VALÉRIE K. ORLANDO, Professor of French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park