The starting point is to consider the framework with which we view films about Africa. When we acknowledge the historical underpinnings, then we begin to understand why we interpret images of Africa as we do.

Historically, images of Africa and Africans in Hollywood and other films have been tightly interwoven with racist colonial ideologies. The very first filmmakers on the continent (and many who never set foot in Africa) built an unequal racial representation structure that many films still subscribe to. The racial hierarchy employed by these films is informed by the notion of racist human evolutionism introduced by the European Enlightenment and proliferated throughout Africa during colonialism.

Hollywood and smaller industries continually adhere to this racist model of humanity and culture by representing Africa in essentialist tropes: tortured black bodies, white guilt, black demons, and white intellect, to name a few.

Yet the imperialist framework of representation that remains effective today did not derive from colonial ignorance. There is a popular assumption that misrepresentations, or ‘false’ images of Africa, rest on Western ignorance and that truer images of Africa are based on knowledge.

However, equating ignorance with falsehood and knowledge with truth is problematic. False representations of Africa are not based on ignorance but rather on a centuries-old knowledge structure, most famously highlighted by Edward Said’s comments on the Occident in his book, Orientalism (1978).

Said says of Orientalism that it “ . . . is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment.”

One of the primary aims of this series, then, is to recognize the origins of Hollywoodian images of Africa within this knowledge structure so that they are no longer passed off as Western ignorance but identified as the powerful paradigm that they are.

I will start next week with a discussion of the Tarzan films and work forward from there. As Sean has said, the academic-speak is now out of the way. See you next time.