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Happy to announce that Adeshina Afolayan (Philosophy, @UniIbadan) and I co-edited a special issue for @AfricaJacs on the films of Nigerian filmmaker @tkelani, with @iwalesino, Matthew Brown, Alessandro Jedlowski, Ayo Adeduntan and Ying Cheng contributing important pieces.
1/16
1/16
We had five solid essays and two interview transcripts that all explore the philosophical implications of Kèlání’s cinemas in ways that existing studies on him have not yet done.
2/16
2/16
Analyzing Kèlání’s work as a form of philosophical thought is the premise of several articles, something that has not been done for African filmmakers, although it has been suggested in relation to several African novelists including Achebe and Ngugi.
3/16
3/16
But Kèlání’s films exhibit an intense focus on representing a Yorùbá cultural universe which Jonathan Haynes notes is deliberately encoded into his cinema. As some of d essays show, a Yorùbá nationalism, however, need not undermine d possible globalism of his film texts.
4/16
4/16
The worlding of Kèlání’s films is generative of philosophical meditations on different aspects of the human experience, as is evident in Adeshina Afolayan’s article, ‘Túndé Kèlání and the Art of Being Yorùbá’ in which Afolayan considers Kèlání to be ‘a Deleuzian thinker.’
5/16
5/16
In a nod to @AdelekeAdeeko’s 'The Arts of Being Yorùbá' (2017), Afolayan wonders if Kèlání's filmic outputs may be iterations of Yorùbá cultural significations of being and unpacks Adéèkó’s claim that trajectories of cultural being are like those of artistic being.
6/16
6/16
Jedlowski’s article, ‘Minor Cinema and Conviviality’, compares Kèlání’s film to the works of Italian filmmaker, Vittoria de Seta, and points to the ‘quietly revolutionary philosophy of conviviality’ based on d pragmatic elasticity of Yorùbá openness in social transactions.
7/16
7/16
This comparative approach is rare in Nollywood studies and shows new directions for scholarship, as Kèlání is also shown to project a commitment to the blending and coexistence of past and present, tradition and modernity as Haynes suggests.
8/16
8/16
Brown's article explores what he calls Kèlání’s ‘royal allegories’ and uses these to read Kèlání’s work as an example of sovereign cinema, based on the ideas of African thinkers such as Achille Mbembe on postcolonial necropower, and earlier works like those of @iwalesino.
9/15
9/15
For Adeduntan, Kèlání’s adaptation of a novel challenges androcentric representations in Nollywood. He argues for an African female assertiveness rooted in the Yorùbá metaphysical principle of female power and balance, inherent in the Yorùbá belief about àjẹ́.
10/16
10/16
Like Jedlowski’s article that stresses links between Yorùbá literary works & Kèlání’s film adaptations, Adeduntan’s article marks d conjunctions & divergences in Kèlání’s adaptation, reinforcing d place of @tkelani's films in global cinema’s deconstruction of patriarchy.
11/16
11/16
Orality, as a critical element of cinematic practice, saturates Kèlání’s cinema, for Cheng. She pinpoints ‘the intergenerational and transformative relationships between Yorùbá performance traditions’ which congeal in Kèlání’s films.
12/16
12/16
Cheng reads Kèlání’s cinemas as initiating new forms of cultural citizenship; her focus on Kèlání’s filmed musical Yorùbá Ẹ Ronú’ (Yorùbá people, think!) captures the philosophical mandate of @tkelani's films that other contributors also acknowledge in their analyses.
13/16
13/16
Adapted from Hubert Ògúǹdé’s famous play, 'Yorùbá Ẹ Ronú' reemerges in Kèlání’s oeuvre as a cinematic assertion of Yorùbá commentary discourses and philosophical sensibilities, though his films also set out to entertain, as @iwalesino's interview shows.
14/16
14/16
‘Yorùbá Ẹ Ronú’ is the rhetorical assertion that not only makes Kèlání’s films distinctive, but also makes them a cinematic production of difference, which (to return to Deleuze) is the premise of a film's philosophical significance.
15/16
15/16
@AfricaJacs, recently ranked by the Scopus citescore as #1 out of 965 journals in the category, Literature and Literary Theory (2018), is the perfect home for this dedicated issue on @tkelani's important work. Thanks to Dr. Carli Coetzee 4 her amazing editorial oversight.
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