Gaze Regimes - Tsitsi Dangarembga

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dominant ethnic minority that is so present and defined in the culture of the US.

      The first decade of the new millennium witnessed the rise to preeminence of the Internet and the digital dominance of new media, which have become essential to the work of African women film practitioners. Websites and blogs are a popular means to showcase artists’ statements, biographies, filmographies and trailers. Online video hosting and sharing sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo have enormous potential in the areas of African film spectatorship and distribution. The phenomenal success of social networking utilities such as Facebook and Twitter has also not gone unnoticed by African filmmakers. On a continent that has been frustrated by the difficulties of communication, these digital platforms have been an important means for networking, especially to exchange current information and up-to-the-minute activity. This burst of energy fostered by these unprecedented media tools may indeed suggest that a new era has begun. While this is an exciting and potentially game-changing development, it must be viewed with equal caution as the digital divide continues to plague Africa in particular. As the Internet becomes the standard for communication, those in the more impoverished parts of the African continent who have limited access to these communication capabilities will be rendered less visible or left out completely.

      At the start of the second decade of the millennium the African Union declared 2010–2020 the African Women’s Decade. Since the end of the UN Decade for Women in 1985, the achievements of a generation have come to fruition. The hope is that the efforts of women since the inception of African cinema some half a century ago will continue to serve as a model for this generation of women who, having learnt important lessons from their elders, will forge ahead into a future that has many more opportunities, resources and possibilities.

      REFERENCES

      AACDD. ‘World Festival of Black Arts and Cultures’. African and African-Caribbean Design Diaspora. 2010. [Online]. Available: http://www.aacdd.org/event/events/world-festival-of-black-arts-and-cultures.html (accessed 9 June 2014).

      NOTES

      1 Versions of this article have been published in: Kelly & Robson (2014) and in Ellerson (2012).

      2 See Institut Panos Afrique de l’Ouest (The Panos Institute West Africa). ‘Femmes africaines des médias: Portraits de journalists et de cinéastes africaines’. January 2005. [Online]. Available: http://www.panos-ao.org/ipao/IMG/Femmes_Afric_Medias.pdf (accessed 1 March 2014).

      3 While in Moscow, Maldoror met the late Ousmane Sembene, who is regarded as the father of African cinema, while studying on a scholarship at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) (formerly known as the All- Union-State Institute of Cinematography). Josephine Woll traces the connection between the Soviet Union and francophone African filmmakers who trained there, noting that in the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union offered support to sub-Saharan African countries (In Pfaff 2004).

      4 Interview with author, February 1997 at FESPACO in Ouagadaougou,Burkina Faso.

      5 The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) was created in order to address Western feminist hegemony on women’s studies, feminist ideology and research on women in general, which became increasing visible during the United Nations Programme for International Women’s Year in 1975 (see AAWORD 1982).

      CHAPTER 2: ‘I AM A FEMINIST ONLY IN SECRET’

      INTERVIEW WITH TAGHREED ELSANHOURI AND CHRISTINA VO N BRAUN

      INTERVIEW BY INES KAPPERT

      In September 2010 African women filmmakers met with taz editor, German author and journalist Ines Kappert, who also took the time to interview German intellectual, filmmaker and feminist academic Christina von Braun and Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri. While debate about the state of filmmaking on the continent continues, especially for women practitioners, there is an increasing demand for stories which capture authentic perspectives and reveal how women from the continent narrate stories from an African point of view. Within the framework of the three-day ‘ARTSWork: Meeting of African Women Filmmakers’ conference, Elsanhouri and von Braun met to discuss what it means to take a camera in one’s hand as a woman in the Sudan and why feminism has a bad reputation in African societies.

      •

      INES KAPPERT: In your films and in your work in general, the gender perspective and negotiations between men and women play an important role. Would you call yourselves feminists?

      TAGHREED ELSANHOURI: Only in secret.

      CHRISTINA VON BRAUN: Naturally I am a feminist. The term is used almost only in a defamatory sense in the public domain; this is all the more reason to confess to it.

      TAGHREED: To label myself a feminist would be counterproductive. We, that is my generation of women between 20 and 40 years old, are all grateful today for what women achieved in the seventies, but in our everyday lives we have learned that we have to proceed more strategically in order to get from A to B. Apart from that, for me as a black woman, race is just as important as gender.

      INES [TO CHRISTINA]: Younger women, especially, dismiss the feminist movement as a point of reference in the struggle for their own freedom of action remarkably often. Does that annoy you?

      CHRISTINA: Annoy? I don’t know. If women can’t relate to feminism, then they are entitled not to. That doesn’t affect me. But, unfortunately, closet feminists de facto put their names to the defamatory attributions to feminism. We shouldn’t participate in these derogatory discourses, and that doesn’t at all mean adopting an uncritical stance towards women’s movements and the different shades of feminism. But of course I understand that it is somewhat different for a Sudanese woman than for myself.

      TAGHREED: Perhaps it is time to rehabilitate the term. At the moment to be a feminist is just as much as to be despised for saying: ‘I am a Communist.’

      INES: What meaning does solidarity have for you?

      TAGHREED: That has to do with my multi-culturalism,

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