Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema – Edition II

Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema 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 film. Edition II Les Saignantes (2005) surveys how Jean-Pierre Bekolo futurizes, cinematically adapts, and therefore immortalizes the pre-colonial female ritual and society of mevungu. Power hierarchies are turned upside down by positioning the woman's erotic body as the healing vessel to the politically and sexually corrupt state. Afi refers to contemporary Cameroonian political historian Achille Mbembe’s theoretical frameworks to help us better readBlack African cinema’s sexy first sci-fi Les Saignantes. Edition II, in both form and content, explores the futuristic underbelly of Yaoundé through coined concepts of commandment, necropolitics, deathworlds, and jouissance.