New Directions in African Film Studies

Abstract

This review essay examines three recent contributions to African film studies: Lokangaka Losambe’s Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film, Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s Queer African Cinemas, and Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address. Each book proposes a distinctive framework for interpreting African screen media, addressing questions of agency, subjectivity and modernity. The essay explores how these texts expand the field’s methodological and theoretical horizons – utilising concepts such as globalectics, Afri-queer fugitivity and periliberalism – to read cinematic form and reception across diverse contexts. Attention is given to the ways in which these authors reconsider the African film canon, foreground new archives, and offer innovative approaches to issues of visibility, indirectness and cultural negotiation. The review situates these works within broader developments in African cinema, including recent trends in genre, distribution and representation, and argues for a plural and flexible critical practice attuned to the evolving nature of African screen cultures.