Emblematic Elusions portrays how African filmmakers redefine the Black form in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Using an erotic lens, each edition presents a film essay analyzing a significant Black African movie.


A focus on the question of Eros in African cinema allows for an intuitive opening for larger discourses of the erotics of history, (post)colonialism, migration and diaspora, socio-economic dynamics and (post)nationalism. African auteurs [re]position the nude Black female form from a wounded canvas to challenging, exposing, sensitizing, and healing the qualms of the African societies these films represent. Considering the historicity of visual consumption of the nude Black body, the series centers the power of the moving image to bridge the dialectics of visual pleasure and sexual pleasure. Indeed, “African culture is more discreet, less externalized, more modest and restrained. Every disclosure of the matter is a violation of the matter. In this sense, cinema is transgression.” (Folly, 1996) Considering cinema’s inherent ability - and burden, to an extent - of making matter seen - such a dichotomy allows for complex yet invigorating discourse.

Edition I lays the foundation with Black African Cinema’s first feature,
La Noire de…/Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966).