_{As an ongoing research, Venessa dedicates her life’s work to providing the first-ever comprehensive study on the subject of eroticism and the nude Black female [-presenting] form in African Cinema.}

<sub>Its foundational Master thesis Within Double Restraint: the Aesthetics & Dialectics of Erotic [Re]presentation advocates for the concept and application of eroticism as an analytical lens in the study of African cinema. This piece unveils and investigates representations of sexuality and the nude female form of the continental cinema. One of the most useful concepts through which one can understand the problematic of erotic representation in African cinema is the notion of ‘double restraint’. Reflecting itself through a form of scopophobia, that is, a restrained response to its communities’ moral codes, and the West’s voyeuristic and fetishistic scopic intrusion towards the Black body. Protectionist conceptions towards sexuality in both African cinema as well as in Black feminist scholarship are partial responses to colonialism’s legacies establishing stereotypical tropes of an insatiable hypersexual African physicality. Although, by bringing attention back to pre-colonial oral traditions, we can begin to disrupt and redefine these implied limits of moral transgressions, And reflectively discover whether Black African cineastes choose to adopt them. Throughout the continent’s multiplicity and diversity of cultures, exuberance in erotic tales and their practices do indeed reveal an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Indeed, by relying on indigenous cultures, “Within Double Restraint” contradicts the present to reposition eros as an “African” mode of film theoretical discourse. The filmic analyses map the cinema’s progressive unrobing...

Keywords: eroticism, sexuality, voyeurism, visibility, showability, spectatorship, affect, scopophilia, scopophobia, imaginary, pleasure, desire, agency, stereotype, fetichism, libidinal economy, protectionism, monstration, secrecy, censorship, taboo, transgression, death, liberation</sub>