African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production.
Carmela Garritano is an associate professor of Africana Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research has been supported by grants from Fulbright IIE and the West African Research Association.
“Rarely does a book come along that opens up an entirely new world
in cinema studies. This sophisticated volume, a groundbreaking book
for a number of reasons, does just that…. Summing Up: Highly
recommended.”
*Choice*
“An extremely important contribution to the field of African media
studies. Garritano’s work is not only the first monograph to focus
on Ghanaian video movies, it also adds to ongoing conversations
about postcolonial visual cultures, globalization, consumerism, and
African gender dynamics…. Garritano has written what might easily
be the first feminist monograph on popular African screen
media.”
*Black Camera*
“A satisfying and authoritative account…. Garritano situates
Ghana’s video industries within complex global flows of capital,
neo- liberal economies, and their effects on desire and
subjectivity…. The book’s scope and conceptual framing will be
familiar and useful to readers in other areas of film and media
studies.”
*African Arts*
“In this impressive work, it is clear that the close analyses of
the various visual texts and their respective subject matter are
informed by both solid ethnographic fieldwork insights and the
supple application of theoretical perspectives from film and
literary studies…. When Ghanaian popular culture studies does
become an established subfield in African studies, this book should
definitely be required reading.”
*Cinema Journal*
“This book is a forerunner in the excavation and understanding of
the Ghanaian video movie industry's emergence out of neoliberal
economic policies over the past two decades. It highlights the
struggles and tensions between Ghana’s dynamic local, national, and
regional video movie industries. Garritano brings to light the
contemporary paradoxical struggle of Ghanaian video movies’
attempts to creatively re-frame and confront ‘the grand narratives
of modernity and globalization’ while simultaneously often being
complicit to such forces.”
*African Studies Quarterly*
“With African Video Movies and Global Desires, Carmela Garritano
has established her place among the major interpreters of
contemporary African video films…whose groundbreaking work has
served to establish a new field of cinema studies and a new
approach to African Cinema.”
*African Studies Review*
“This is an excellent book: admirably sophisticated, solid, cogent,
purposeful, and fine-grained. It is built on an enormous amount of
careful research … and fieldwork of a depth that only a very few
other researchers on African film can match.”
“[This book] makes an extremely important contribution to African
film, media, and cultural studies more generally with the way in
which it focuses its close film analyses through the lens of
gender.”
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