Hollywood and Africa

Hollywood and Africa – recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ myth from 1908–2020
is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film
productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent
continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a
cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature
and film.

Hollywood and Africa identifies the ‘colonial
mastertext’ of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic
genealogy and context for the term’s development and consolidation. An
array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed
to analyse the deep genetic strands of Hollywood–Africa film
adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and
space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave
Hollywood–Africa phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions
about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose,
interrogate — and even critique — these tropes of Darkest Africa while
sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against
Hollywood’s whitewashing of African history.