The culturally-rooted comic traditions of koteba theater and joking kinship have shaped West African comedies through various forms of humour. Debrouillardise (hustle) has turned the urban scene into a comic scene, a site for individual realization. To highlight the ever-growing production and success of comedies and other popular genres, this book explores the distribution and reception of selected productions by emphasizing the public's strong resonance with local stories and a character-based comedy involving popular comedians.

In contrast to art films or "auteur films" that tend to be confined to the festival circuit, comedies and popular genres reach a far wider audience through local distribution networks, satellite TV channels, pirated DVDs, and online distribution platforms. This book engages a discussion of contemporary African media productions as seen outside the usual frameworks of cinema engage, the art house, or auteur approaches.

While examining production and distribution through the lenses of proximity, appropriation, and transnationalization, this volume invites readers to reconsider the way genre films, as well as other kinds of productions, have been previously evaluated and in doing so addresses the critical neglect of comedy and other popular genres in the scholarship on African cinema.

About the Author
Boukary Sawadogo is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and of Black Studies at the City College of New York. He is Vice-Chair of the Film, Visual, and Media Caucus of the African Literature Association and a 2016-2018 CUNY Mellon Faculty Fellow.


Book Information
ISBN 9781611863116
Author Boukary Sawadogo
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Michigan State University Press
Publisher Michigan State University Press