Analogue Africa : Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Africa is a convenient abbreviation for 54 countries in which more than a thousand languages are spoken. This book offers a side-long glance, one that complicates the idea of a single continent. So much of what we understand about these places comes from western media sources, which too often treat Africa as a metaphor for their own anxieties.

Yet, by picking out specific episodes and practices - cinema, art, ethnography and journalism -- Harding rescues us, and Africa, from such patronising generalisations. Analogue Africa excavates the many facets of the anti-colonial imagination: cinema, photography, art and journalism. The book celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists - and a handful of Europeans -- have reimagined the colonial encounter and the struggle against white minority rule .

This includes artists, filmmakers and photographers such as John Akomfrah, William Kentridge, Binyavanga Wainaina, Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory and Sarah Maldoror. Harding also looks at the role of western museums - The British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, Tervuren- that display African art, and what it says about the post colonial imagination.