Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Black African Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.

[Source: University of California Press].

Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Critical Approach to African Cinema Discourse. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.

Critical Approach to African Cinema Discourse utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to lay bare the diversity and essence of African cinema discourse. It is an anthology of historical reflections, critical essays, and interviews by film critics, historians, theorists, and filmmakers that signifies a dialogue and engagement apropos the ideology and cultural politics of film production in Africa. The contributors are extremely concerned, not only with the history of African cinema, but with its future and its potential. This book, then, is not limited to the expansion of the discourse on African cinema, but tries to approach the definition of the critical canon within the exigencies and manifestations of art and African sociopolitical practices. The authors view these practices as an investment in a cultural imperative stemming from the quest to delineate how critical methodologies are derived from and shape contemporary historical and cultural practices. Hence, the contributions are less about the usual constrictive method of analysis and more about illustrating manifestations of an interrogative critical methodology that is certainly an offspring of an indigenous African critical cum cinematic culture and paradigms.

[Source: Rowman & Littlefield].

Thompson, Katrina Daly. Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.

This book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. She offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity.

[Source: Amazon.com].

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Tella, Oluwaseun. Africa’s Soft Power: Philosophies, Political Values, Foreign Policies and Cultural Exports. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, N.Y: Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003176022.

This book investigates the ways in which soft power is used by African countries to help drive global influence. Selecting four of the countries most associated with soft power across the continent, this book delves into the currencies of soft power across the region: from South Africa’s progressive constitution and expanding multinational corporations, to Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry and Technical Aid Corps (TAC) scheme, Kenya’s sport diplomacy, fashion and tourism industries, and finally Egypt’s Pan-Arabism and its reputation as the cradle of civilisation. The book asks how soft power is wielded by these countries and what constraints and contradictions they encounter. Understandings of soft power have typically been driven by Western scholars, but throughout this book, Oluwaseun Tella aims to Africanise our understanding of soft power, drawing on prominent African philosophies, including Nigeria’s Omolúwàbí, South Africa’s Ubuntu, Kenya’s Harambee, and Egypt’s Pharaonism.

[Source: Routledge].

Tcheuyap, Alexie. De l’écrit à l’écran. [From Writing to the Screen] Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press / Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2004. https://doi.org/10.14375/np.9782760305809.

De l’écrit à l’écran is the first book that focuses on the question of cinematic rewriting of the French-speaking African novel. It shows the creativity of the cinematic text compared to the literary one. It formulates innovating conclusions compared to purely speculative, thematic or ideologic questions on “adaptation”, an act of recreation and rewriting whose mechanisms go beyond African cinemas.

[Source: OAPEN, adapted and translated from French].

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Shaka, Femi Okiremuete. Modernity and the African Cinema: A Study in Colonial Discourse, Post-Coloniality, and Modern African Identities. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004.

This book argues that the construction of modern African identity in all spheres of life, including the cinematic institution, is a product of the Euro-African contact that started in the fifteenth century. Traditional African institutions, which were overlaid with European substitutes during the period of colonialism, were transformed by this contact; and although the post-colonial period, especially the earlier years, sought to romanticize traditional African institutions with its politics of cultural re-awakening, a pragmatic marriage of the institutional practices of both continents emerged over the years, resulting in new practices that could be considered hybrid in nature. Many of these new hybrid practices are presented through cinema, one of the modern institutions inherited from colonialism.

[Source: Goodreads].