Table of Contents

Part I: On the Genealogy of the Camera-Eye and Sissako’s Poetic Possibilities
Chapter 1: Mapping the Theoretical Terrain: Cinema, Sensor-Ship, and the Search for Authenticity in the Age of Neoliberal Rationalities and Islamic Terror
Chapter 2: The Camera-Eye, The Arte wave and Afro-Futurism
Part II: Aesthetic and Film Analysis
Chapter 3: Sissako’s Cinema: Communal Life as an Aesthetic Practice
Chapter 4: Life on Earth (1998): Meditation on Belonging in a Globalized World
Chapter 5: Heremakono (2002): On African Imaginative Landscapes, Frontiers, and Journeys
Chapter 6: Bamako (2007): Africa, Cowboys, and Postcolonial Economic Blues.
Chapter 7: Timbuktu (2015): Notes on Art, Terror, and Cosmopolitan Politics
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Marginal Subjectivities and Globalization: The Subaltern Speaking
About the Author

About the Author

Olivier J. Tchouaffe is professor of film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

An enlightening and thought-provoking study that treats Sissako’s cinema as a locus of multiple practices and connections for the investigation of new modalities in contemporary African cinema. Tchouaffe’s compelling analysis highlights Sissako’s artistic intervention as one of the most important forms of resistance to multiple expressions of violence within the globalized world.
*Julie Papaioannou, University of Rochester*

Olivier J. Tchouaffe’s in-depth critical appreciation on the films of Abderahmanne Sissako is steeped in enduring social and political theory and modes of knowledge production. This book explores a sophisticated body of work with temporal and cosmological significance, and also highlights the beauty found in the banal and quotidian elements in Sissako’s portrayal of African lives. For this author, Sissako’s body of work is Africa’s gift to the world based on his presentation of positive utopias inherent in both premodern and modern civilizations. This book underscores how the filmmaker speaks to a world in which every civilization has its place in the universal rendezvous of victory.
*Saheed Yinka Adejumobi, Seattle University*