The Cinematic Language of Naked Protest

Abstract

Recently in Africa, documentaries have appeared that revisit contemporary gendered traumas wherein women threaten to, or do, strip naked, to signal dispossession, to punish men, and to resist injustice. These documentaries do more than just bring to our attention the disempowering political, juridical, social, and economic conditions that call for exceptional modes of resistance. They highlight the forms of resistance that emerge in response to the widespread sense of perishability and injustice prevalent in postcolonial nation-states. Assuming that topics such as genital cursing and female genital surgeries are inherently exotic in filmic narratives, this essay analyzes several documentaries to showcase the cinematic language that the filmmakers deploy for representing women's defiant disrobing. This question dovetails into notions of authorial “authority,” given the filmmakers' racial affiliations and class background. Exploring these questions, I outline the texture of the filmmakers' cinematic language to argue that while at times reminiscent of old, colonizing representational politics, the new language offers more than repetition. Thus this essay contributes to the politics of documentary filmmaking in Africa and its influence on race, gender, and geography.

Notes

1 Section 10 of the apartheid-era Urban Areas Act grants rights to urban housing rights to Black South Africans who were born in or have lived in an urban area for more than 15 years; this does not include single women and migrant workers, who are thus even more precariously placed within urban labor economies. A group of tired women built shacks on unclaimed land in Dobsonville. Unsurprisingly, the police arrived, armed for violent demolition. The film's narrator says, “the younger women shack dwellers stripped off their clothes, taunted the police, ululated, shouted in anger about their plight and their pain, sang and danced, and held up printed placards demanding homes and security of tenure” (Meintjes, 2007, p. 347).

2 “Double exposures” designates the laying bare of the object's truth for persuasive purposes while often hiding its structure of power (Bal, 1996).

3 Disney's powerful connections in the American media scene, women's achievements, and the quality of the documentary combined for the broad publicity Pray the Devil received in the United States and internationally. From news genres, such as Bill Moyers on PBS and Tavis Smiley to purely entertainment shows, including The Colbert Report, from print media, such as O, The Oprah Magazine to Newsweek, Disney and Gbowee engaged multiple audiences.

4 The war was explained as stemming from power, money, and ethnicity: economic inequality, the conflict between the rich and the poor, or longstanding ethnic hatred between indigenous Liberians and the descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country in 1847, or for the control of natural resources, or all three.

5 Inspired by anger and a dream, Leymah Gbowee, a former refugee, an unmarried mother of three, and a social worker mobilized the women at her church to join her in peace marches and prayer vigils. Their organization was called the Christian Women's Initiative. Inspired by this, Asatu Bah Kenneth, a Muslim woman who was president of the Liberia Female Law Enforcement Association, joined Gbowee, and eventually they created the Liberian Mass Action for Peace movement. Soon, Gbowee rose to leadership thanks to her passion and organizing skills. Her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Prayer, Sisterhood, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (2011), is an illuminating sequel to the documentary.

6 In a 2009 interview with Feminist Classroom, Disney explained that she went to Liberia at the invitation of her friend, Swanee Hunt, founder of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University. Dr. Swanee and her philanthropist friends were asked to help with education, especially building schools, given Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's limited national budget of $33 million to run Liberia (the amount that parking meters in New York City gross annually, Disney's comparison).

7 Others include Karoline Frogner's Duhozanye: A Rwandan Village of Widows (2011), Elizabeth Tadic's Umoja: No Men Allowed (2010), Paula Heredia's Africa Rising: The Grassroots Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation (2009), Ilse van Velzen and Femke van Velzen's Weapon of War (2009), and Gini Reticker and Sandy McLeod's 2003 Asylum.

8 For similar critiques, see Okome, “Listening to Africa, Misinterpreting and Misunderstanding Africa: Western Feminist Evangelism on African Women” (2006), Nnaemeka, “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa's Way” (2004); Amadiume, “African Women's Body Images in Postcolonial Discourse and Resistance to Neo-Crusaders” (2008), Oyewumi's African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (2003) and Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (2005), and Gunning's “Cutting Through the Obfuscation: Female Genital Surgeries in Neoimperial Culture” (1992).

9 The Ghana-based Women in Peace and Security Network (WIPSEN-Africa) works with women in several African countries, including Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and Togo.

10 They include the 2007 Blue Ribbon Peace Award from the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard University, the Women's eNews 2008 Leaders for the 21st Century Award, the 2009 Gruber Prize for Women's Rights, the 2009 Profile in Courage Award, and the 2010 John Jay Medal for Justice

11 In addition to Pray the Devil, the other four documentaries in the series include War Redefined, The War We Are Living, Peace Unveiled, and I Came to Testify.” Its narrators are Hollywood legends: Matt Damon, Geena Davis, Tilda Swinton, and Alfre Woodard.

12 For more on the difference between memory and history, see Nora's seminal essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire” (1989). And for a conceptualization of history as a bundle of silences in the postcolonial context, see Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naminata Diabate

Naminata Diabate is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, Naminata's research primarily explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, and film. Her latest publications include “Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance, and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto's Chuchote Pas Trop” (Research in African Literatures, 2016). “Women's Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature and Its Futures” (2016) and her forthcoming book is Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa. Naminata is currently working on her second book: African Sexualities and Pleasures under Neoliberalism.