Comedy of power, power of comedy: strategic transformations in African cinemas1

Abstract

This essay examines the structural as well as semantic constructions governing the multiplication of comic signifiers in African films. In spite of nationalist considerations that defined cinema against entertainment, this article provides evidence that in contemporary cultural productions, nation building is not incompatible with laughter, buffoonery and carnival life which all liberate postcolonial subjects from various anxieties. By determining the correlation between the political, the social and the comic, this article also establishes the strategic transformations of African cinemas whose targeted spectatorship has moved from ‘global’ to ‘local’. Such metamorphosis constitutes a major step towards the development of a truly popular cinema which, because of decades of nationalist imperatives, was nothing but a myth.