ADDAMMS MUTUTA

Debates about the global south dominate diverse disciplines of enquiry. This book, Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics, edited by Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha, joins this conversation through a critique of global south cinemas. The book features well-written contributions on Egyptian, Indian, South African, Colombian, and Nigerian cinemas. Its main idea is ‘southern cinema aesthetics’, broadly imagined. I highly recommend the editors’ deliberate use of the plural ‘aesthetics’ to guide the book’s guiding philosophy, which acknowledges the plurality of processes of production and reception, places and people.

The quest towards ‘how … to relate aesthetics and historical or sociological location; to pay attention to form while at the same time not arguing for the absolute autonomy of the visual image’ and a subsequent question ‘What is cinema?’ imagines the quandary of thought which characterises debates about the global south through cinema. Yet, in asking this question in chapter one, Cinemas of the Global South: Towards A Southern Aesthetics, Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha propose ‘untangling’ as a direction of introspection towards global south aesthetics beyond Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s canon.

While this historical basis emphasised a revolutionary ideology for the second and third cinemas, today’s thinking about the global south seeks new, more localised meanings. Picking on aesthetics as a possible route of theorising contemporary cinemas of the global south is thus a welcome quest. This chapter reflects on the connection between ‘south’ as a way of making sense of tangled meanings and the specificity of cinema aesthetics as one way to untangle these meanings. They contrast the global south ‘as an ongoing project, a conceptual and experiential category that is not a mere geographical agglomeration’ and as ‘an assemblage of virtuality, creativity, and affect’, taking Egypt and India as case studies.

The second chapter, Southern Aesthetics: The Egyptian Way: Shady Abdelsalam’s The Night of Counting the Years (1969), reflects on Egypt’s local aesthetics through a critique of an early Egyptian film. Amir Taha, the author, exalts Shady Abdelsalam’s unique cinema aesthetics as ‘presenting the notion of Egyptian aesthetics in particular, and … a part of cinematic southern aesthetics in the broader sense.’ Mixing descriptive analysis with Egypt’s history, Taha further terms the film’s director as offering ‘an alternative writing of history in a mode of historiography which is not concerned with the hegemonic chronology of events, but with their virtuality.’ He connects the film to southern aesthetics: a ‘concept that is in tune with and, in fact, of the notions of liberation, resistance, and decolonialisation.’

Chapter three, Constellations of Time: Towards a Cartography of Plundered Memories, is written by Diego Granja do Amaral. It examines Looted and Hidden (2017), an Israel documentary film ‘on never-before-seen footage and photographs stolen by the Israeli army, most of which were looted in Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.’ The film is described as ‘an exercise of finding connections between documents and testimonies, affects and real events. As a result, the film consists of a patchwork, a constellation of perceptions.’ Amaral’s argument is centred on memory, curated through written documentation and archival resources. Its patchwork aesthetic is not built on completion or continuity but on recovering Palestinian archival memories at one point disintegrated in a Beirut Museum through invasion plunder. Entanglement is emphasised in the critique of the film’s visual aesthetic and the colonial afterlives it documents. Amaral tangentially discusses this idea concerning the oppositions of visual representation of ‘elements do not reinforce each other but rather deny, add to, challenge, complete, rearticulate.’ This helps stitch together rebellion and resistance into a memory.

The idea of cinema of resistance continues in Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s Singing in Saffron Times: Documentary Film and Resistance to Majoritarian Politics in India. Here, the authors discuss the ‘hegemonic politics of hate against religious minorities and marginal caste groups in India.’ They set off by propping efforts towards counter-narratives against censorship, highlighting the meaningless of the latter ‘given the dramatic changes in the production, circulation and consumption of media.’ In connecting India’s political documentary cinema and the multi-pronged Southern aesthetics, they specify the question: ‘How can we cinematically speak of the politics of hate or resistance to this hate in ways that avoid simplistic polarities and make space for a thoughtful engagement with issues of identity and difference?’ This is the basis of the chapter’s broad reflections on the invisibility of hate in the mundane, micropolitics of new public spheres, and the role of cinema in rendering these spaces ‘of everyday transactions’ discussable. The main achievement of this chapter is its critique of the Southern aesthetic as always localised rather than broad-based and as an interim between ‘epistephilic formulation’ and cathartic embodiment. Their discussion proposes the location rather than the characteristics of the global south cinema aesthetic, celebrating its ‘fluid, subaltern artistic traditions’ and ‘spectatorship.

Local Realism: Indian Independent Film as a Socio-political Medium is the title of chapter four, written by Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram. Continuing the preceding discussion on India’s political documentary and its imperative on a singular Indian aesthetic, this article decries the ‘unisonant and uncritical coronation of Bollywood as the potentate of Indian cinema and culture.’ The author focuses on the ‘socio-politically attuned new wave of independent Indian films’ – praising their ‘glocal film form’ – as counter-cinemas. Devasundaram highlights the films’ ‘globally relatable aesthetic fusion of film form and style – synthesising local and international cinematic sensibilities’ and ‘increasing absorption into the catalogues of web streaming giants Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.’ The article contests the prospect for a single Indian aesthetic, instead proposing the ‘local realism’ aesthetic – ‘a presentation of the everyday aesthetic world from grassroots and marginal perspectives and lived experiences that exemplify broader entanglements with several specific discursive strands of the Indian socio-political matrix.’ This proposition permits various localised aesthetics to be recognised and adopted in the broader context of the global south.

In Indian Gangsters, American Noir and Africa’s Drum Magazine: The Making of a South African Gangster Fliek during Early Apartheid, Damon Heatlie asks: ‘Does a Southern aesthetic of cinema need to involve the artisanal, possibly guerrilla-style, practice of filmmaking we associate with a ‘revolutionary’ cinema of resistance? Or could it, in the absence of actual film production capabilities, also reside in the meaning production at the site of reception of mainstream content, in the Southern beholder?’ Taking South Africa’s Indian cinema practised at the margins of mainstream apartheid cinema as a case, Heatlie shifts the focus of southern cinema aesthetics from production to consumption. The author broadly aligns this new aesthetic to the ‘decolonial aesthetic and performance of ‘disobedience’, in which gestures of refusal to colonial authority and superiority become possible, even before ‘decolonisation’ or ‘postcolonialism’ is conceivable.’ This approach to theorising global south cinemas uniquely equalises ‘reception (consumption and reconfiguration of filmic meaning by audience members)’ with ‘production of meaning in the global north.’ South Africa’s Indian cinemas provide a case for this discussion.

Under Contagious Aesthetics: Bios, Politics and Cinema in Contemporary Kerala, Veena Hariharan focuses on representing contagion and containment as an aesthetic in Indian cinema. Hariharan’s critique goes beyond the metaphoric, epidemic, technological readings of virus, to its appropriation as an aesthetic of the newgen Malayalam cinema. Virus here, also the title of a newgen film, illustrates the ‘network aesthetic’ – how the contagion transfer between ‘ostensibly stable networks’ and ‘transnational circulation of the disease’ mirrors human social networks, and also non-human networks. The virus is also a metaphor for resistance to mainstream aesthetics and how networks of different people within the newgen film processes override the tenets of the old mainstream cinema. The author argues, ‘Hyper-localizing and regionalising are seen as the antidote to the global, and therefore a virtue.’

Dealing with The Precarious City: Violence, Memory and Rhythms of Endurance in La sombra del caminante (Ciro Guerra 2005) & La sociedad del semáforo (Ruben Mendoza, 2010), written by Luis F. Rosero Amaya, critiques new aesthetics in Colombia’s urban cinemas. The article discusses ‘public violence’ as a ‘temporal experience of decomposition whereby violence and conflict act as forces that disrupt temporal coordinates of urban subjects’ and ‘the subjects of the city as precarious agents who are eventually capable of rearranging those toxic circumstances, with the purpose of recalibrating their state of inertia and moving towards an aspiration.’ The aesthetic proposed here is of temporality as ‘recomposition of the subject and rhythms of endurance.’ The chapter also touches on urban subjectivity, colonial temporality, embodiment of trauma and healing, and urban connections – among other aspects of precariousness. The author draws on these to characterise the southern cinema aesthetic in three ways: ‘images of emergency, inertias and toxicity’, ‘plurality of reasons and forms of agency’, and ‘revisit some well-established cinematic genres, narratives and modes of expression in the world cinemas.’

The last chapter is C A. Chukwudumebi Obute’s Cinematics of Southern Environmentalism. It discusses the ‘apparition of slums across the imagined spaces of the Global South in motion pictures, extending the tropes of environmental devastation beyond the postcolonial narrative, into the cascading ecological times.’ It focuses on cinematic (de) territorialisation, environmental narration, resilience and affinities of resistance in the Indo-Nigerian cinemas ‘intervention in current environmental crisis.’ The assertion that ‘Nollywood stands at crossroads on the Black African continent as a visual empire of national and regional self-reflexivity, embodying the multiple durée of entangled temporalities on the continent’ pre-empts what can be termed a southern aesthetic.

Conclusion
This book broadly seeks to help one grasp the meaning of the Global South through its cinemas. Its quest for a Southern aesthetic is also an articulation of the incompletion, perhaps impossibility, of this process. One may argue that it offers valuable mechanisms to critique storytelling in the ‘new’ global south – if ever there was one. This assertion originates from the multiple frames which the different authors of the book adopt to discuss diverse global south cinemas. Acknowledging the significance of ‘localisation’ in seeking and describing southern cinema aesthetics is thus a call to recognise the global south as not a place or places but frameworks of discussing and narrating different subjectivities of being in these places and surviving in them. When considered in this way, as the book’s contributors do, the idea of global south cinema aesthetics – now fragmented – may be encompassed within the framework of the transience of practices. The idea of a global south aesthetic is thus a kernel for unspecified future meaning(s) in the production or reception of films of and by the region. 

Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha (Eds). Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2024; 231 pp. ISBN: 978-1-003-42183-2 (ebk). Price: £29.59.

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