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African Fiction and Film

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About This Guide

This guide attempts to provide list of resources to students or researchers studying or researching issues related to African fiction and film. 

In this guide you will find:

  • General/Reference works: a selection of print and electronic resources providing overview type of information about African fiction or film including the lives and works of African writers or filmmakers as well as literary and cinema theories.
  • .Books written on major topics related to African Cinema or about films from individual African countries or by filmmakers from Africa.
  • Resources for finding critical interpretations of literature or films on Africa in the form of journal articles.
  • Repositories and databases of African films
  • Citation formats and guides. 

Featured Resources

Student's Guide to Writing College Papers

Turabian's popular guide, the team behind Chicago's widely respected The Craft of Research has reconceived and renewed this classic for today's generation. Designed for less advanced writers than Turabian's Manual of Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams here introduce students to the art of defining a topic, doing high-quality research with limited resources, and writing an engaging and solid college paper. The Student's Guide is organized into three sections that lead students through the process of developing and revising a paper. Part 1, "Writing Your Paper," guides students through the research process with discussions of choosing and developing a topic, validating sources, planning arguments, writing drafts, avoiding plagiarism, and presenting evidence in tables and figures. Part 2, "Citing Sources," begins with a succinct introduction to why citation is important and includes sections on the three major styles students might encounter in their work - Chicago, MLA, and APA - all with full coverage of electronic source citation. Part 3, "Style," covers all matters of style important to writers of college papers, from punctuation to spelling to presenting titles, names, and numbers." -- Publisher description.

Learning from the Curse

"This book is about a story (Ousmane Sembene's Xala), about a time (the aftermath of Senegalese Independence), and about a place (Dakar, the capital of Senegal). It's also about the collaboration between an artist and an anthropologist, who have reacted in their different mediums to the story,time and place, and to what the other made of them ...."So opens a unique account in a genre of its own devising that will engage readers interested in Sembene Ousmane as writer and film director, in Senegal, in African film, in West Africa, or in books designed to be desirable objects in their own right.

Beasts of No Nation

In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started -- a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality spins further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. His relationship with his commander deepens even as it darkens, and his camaraderie with a fellow soldier lends a deceptive sense of normalcy to his experience. In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, deeply affecting novel. Both a searing take on coming-of-age and a vivid document of the dark face of war, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary new writer.
 

Third cinema in the third world : the aesthetics of liberation

Although Third Cinema began as a movement of, by, and for the colonized, Gabriel argued passionately for its transnationalist possibilities. In his seminal work Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, for example, he writesthat “the principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays.” 

Screen Studies Collection

A comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed and expansive filmographies. This collection includes the specialist index FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute; AFI Catalog and Film Index International.

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