Justin Izzo

Anxiety As Cinematic Sensation: History and Form in African Documentary Film

This essay studies the relationship between anxiety, form, and history in African documentary film. It asks broadly how these three categories combine and imply each other in documentary narratives of economic and political precarity. Taking up several examples from Francophone Africa, I examine how anxiety is both a thematics and a formal matter of perception in documentary film, one that is always in touch with varied cinematic mediations of historical time. Anxiety thus comes to the fore in formalizations of ideology and its afterlives (La Sir ene de Faso Fani, Burkina Faso); in visualizations of cinematic “time-traveling” between past and present (Pr esident Dia, Senegal); and in everyday negotiations of economic precarity and emerging musical economies (Ç a vibre dans nos têtes, Mali). These films investigate present-making as a historical and affective enterprise, and I argue that documentary film renders this enterprise by converting anxiety into a mode of formal expression. The essay began to take shape during a reading of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) with an eye toward understanding what her analyses of affect and histories of the present have to tell us about the genres of visual culture. For Berlant (2011), the present sees the “waning” of older generic forms that once neatly mapped hopes and plans for “the good life” on any manner of textual and real-world experiences (p. 6). From this perspective, genre codes, configures, and transcribes a range of affective possibilities that both emerge from and respond to social and aesthetic forms. We might consider genre here as a translational exercise that, on the one hand, makes affect legible within a given social or artistic context and, on the other hand, brings these contexts into alignment with the set of possibilities that we have already made meaningful to ourselves. The shift that Berlant traced in the book, however, is related to the short-circuiting of these processes of affective transcription and to the mistranslations that result when generic mapping can no longer adequately account for the “crises” (as she put it) of the present. “In the present from which I am writing about the present,” she argued, “conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and how to imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically” (Berlant, 2011, p. 7). In the fraught present that Berlant described, genres morph or otherwise realign themselves as they respond to the new ways individuals devise for coping with and living in uncertain contemporary moments. But how does documentary film—and, specifically, documentary film in Africa—engage with emergent understandings of the present as a moment of “crisis” and reorganize its formal attributes in new recordings of affective possibilities? And how do these filmed presents, along with the affects they register, make legible the historical mediations that undergird their senses of narrative? These questions guide both my intersection with Berlant’s work as well as the perspective on history, politics, and form in African documentary that I develop in this essay. For one

Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression

like Gandhi. In Outre-mer, Martinique is represented as a symbol of French pride, as the book hints to the ‘great men’ who contributed to the founding of this colony. This place was contrasted with Saint Domingue, which was referenced ‘to elicit nostalgia from the reader and (intradiegetically) to provoke anxiety among the colons’ (52). In sum, Marsh is to be commended for analysing these novels, which have been ignored previously because of racial or imperial biases. She finds common threads among the novels, which bind them together, though written at different times and in disparate places within the former French empire. Due to her attention to detail, this book would be a good source for a graduate or scholar interested in colonial studies. She raises questions about how to think about colonial memory and identity, but also how it applies to events in modern France.

Is globalization a humanism? Pleasure, the world economy, and the global palimpsest according to Gaston-Paul Effa

Abstract This article deals with multilayered narratives of experiences of globalization in Franco-Cameroonian author Gaston-Paul Effas 2005 novel, Voici le dernier jour du monde (Monaco: Editions du Rocher). This book sees an African writer return to his fictionalized home country called Bakassi from France, where he had relocated as a child. Once in Bakassi he observes how his compatriots both appropriate global trends and ideologies of pleasure while simultaneously facing extreme forms of economic marginalization as the country falls prey to endemic social violence. I argue that Effas narrative strategy provokes us to read experiences of Western-led globalism as a palimpsest in which economic exclusion is lived alongside provocatively new and localized understandings of what it means to be human.

From Aesthetics to Allegory: Raphaël Confiant, the Creole Novel, and Interdisciplinary Translation

This essay examines the roles played by ethnographic writing and translation in Raphaël Confiant’s 1994 L’allée des soupirs. This novel fictionalizes the 1959 riots in Martinique while simultaneously creating characters who debate the relative merits of modes of expression capable of capturing the linguistic, cultural, and racial hybridity of créolité in literature. Confiant translates into fictional terms important precepts on Caribbean literary production set out in Eloge de la créolité, which Confiant wrote with Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Bernabé. By transforming the aesthetic problems taken up in Eloge into a thoroughly creolized novel that deals with the hybridized messiness of everyday life, Confiant presents a text that ethnographically allegorizes its own conditions of production. This allegorization mobilizes a process the essay calls “interdisciplinary translation,” which relies on an ongoing process of conversion between ethnographic and literary modes of representation.