Analogue Africa

Africa is a convenient abbreviation for 54 countries in which more than a thousand languages are spoken. This book offers a side-long glance, one that complicates the idea of a single continent by picking out specific episodes, specific practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism – that rescue us from generalisations. So much of what we understand about these places comes from western media sources, which too often treat Africa as a metaphor for their own anxieties.

Analogue Africa excavates the many facets of the anti-colonial imagination: cinema, photography, art and journalism. The book celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists – and a handful of Europeans – have reimagined the colonial encounter and the struggle against white minority rule. This includes artists, filmmakers and photographers such as John Akomfrah, William Kentridge, Binyavanga Wainaina, Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory and Sarah Maldoror. Harding also looks at the role of western museums – The British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, Tervuren – that display African art, and what it says about the post-colonial imagination.