Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema — Edition II

Title: Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema — Edition II

Author: Afi Venessa

Publisher: Afi / Anteism Books

Publication Year: 2024

ISBN: 978-1-7383796-1-3

Emblematic Elusions portrays how African filmmakers redefine the Black form in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Using an erotic lens, each edition presents a film essay analyzing a significant Black African movie.

Edition II looks unto Black African cinema's first sci-fi fiction Les Saignantes/The Bloodettes (2005) to survey how Jean-Pierre Bekolo futurizes, cinematically adapts, and therefore immortalizes the pre-colonial female ritual and society of mevungu. Power hierarchies are turned upside down by positioning the woman's erotic body as the healing vessel to the politically and sexually corrupt state. In both content and form, Edition II explores the futuristic underbelly of Yaoundé through coined Achille Mbembe's concepts of commandment, necropolitics, deathworlds, and jouissance.