| Abstrakt: |
As Jean-Marie Teno claims in Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992), one of the greatest victories of colonization was "cultural genocide" for the ways in which the local culture was erased by the colonial cultural machines, sticking Africans into the purgatory of the gods of colonialism, condemning them as perpetual peripheral characters in the construction of their own history, identity, and salvation. This work, consequently, relies on Teno and the "antidocumentary" perspective which highlights how the former colonized are taking advantage of the tools and techniques of the documentary to interrogate processes in which they were documented, produced, humiliated, and alienated by the colonizers and the ethical necessity to answer back and express a more legitimate representation of blackness in terms of history, memory, and indigenous democratic cultural and political codes to midwife new ways of being and new ways of seeing. In short, it means for Africans to reclaim the power to reenter their own history that had been choked up by the colonial experience. Anti-documentary perspective, therefore, is an ethical action from filmmakers of former colonies emphasizing the importance of decolonizing images in order to evacuate the colonial cultural matrix beginning by changing the gaze over Black history and the Black body for real cultural liberation and development which is the object of Teno's documentaries. Thus, this is a work with a clear eye on redeeming the humanity of Africans long denied by the colonial experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
