Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City

Danai S. Mupotsa teaches in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect, and feminist pedagogies. Danai has edited several volumes, most recently Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele; a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck, and Black Transnational Feminisms and the Question of Structure, (forthcoming) co-edited with Lyn Ossome and Athi Nkopo. Polo B. Moji is Associate Professor in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a PhD in General and Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and her research areas include comparative anglophone/francophone literary and cultural studies, critical black geographies, and literary urban studies. She is the author of Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (2022). Natasha Himmelman is a Puerto Rican/Latinx queer researcher and educator (es una investigadora y educadora puertorriqueña/Latinx cuir). She is an independent researcher whose affiliations have included, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesberg, South Africa; and the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg. South Africa.

1. Introduction 2. Lagos in contemporary Nigerian music video: Brymo’s “1 Pound (The Documentary)” 3. Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu: a relationship of feminist expression, aesthetics and memory 4. Joburg without Joburg: the black South African romcom 5. “There is only one place for me. It is here, entabeni” Inxeba (2017), Kalushi (2016) and the difficulties of “the urban” for the New South African Man 6. Out-of-placeness and the city as a space of relation in apartheid-era cinema 7. Hollywood imagines urban Africa, and it’s as bad as you think 8. Embodiments of love on the margins of Windhoek’s cinematic landscape 9. Kurt Orderson’s Not In My Neighbourhood (2018): spatial violence in Cape Town, New York and São Paulo