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In Sankofa, Nigerian writer Chibundu Onuzo's third novel, a mixed-race, middle-aged woman, Anna, begins to uncover her family's past and reconnects with her West African father after the death of her Welsh mother. I highlight the centrality of the West African concept of Sankofa (which refers to the need to know your history in order to be able to understand the present and move forward into the future) to both Afro-diasporic and postcolonial contexts in which people's access to their own history was taken away from them by an oppressive system. I demonstrate how Sankofa is particularly adept at rendering the protagonist's journey into the past. I also argue that the novel should be read on two levels: first, as a critique of Eurocentric racism (building on the insights of theorist of decolonization Frantz Fanon) and second, as a reflexive encouragement to readers to become careful interpreters, researchers, and critics., INTRODUCTION In Sankofa, British-Nigerian writer Chibundu Onuzo's third novel, a mixed-race, middle-aged woman, Anna, begins to uncover her family's past and reconnects with her West African father after the death [...]

Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York UP, 2019. 268+ viii pages. Paperback. $30. In this ambitious book, Yogita Goyal brings together a corpus of best-selling [...]

This article analyses the ethics of representation in Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb's short 2019 documentaries Louisette and Annie, which highlight the participation of mujahidat (female militants) Louisette Ighilahriz and Annie Fiorio-Steiner in the 1954–1962 war of independence from the French. Given how much these women suffered (including under torture) during the war, how to convey their experiences in an ethical manner is a central concern. Bouchareb achieves an ethical balance between avoiding voyeurism and bearing testimony to these women's suffering and active agency through using film techniques that approach his protagonists with respect, a central feature of his ethical cinema. He also relies on techniques that enhance spectatorial identification with the protagonists through triggering emotional responses. I identify and detail specific formal and thematic choices he made to highlight the past's continuing relevance to the present and to centre women's experiences, voices, and bodies. The films finally honour mujahidat (almost a decade after Bouchareb's male-centred epic film Hors la loi). Seeking to both stage and remedy the difficult anamnesis of the war, they bring memories together and carry messages about the need to always fight against injustice that are relevant on both sides of the Mediterranean, sixty years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critique of French colonial imagery is presented, with a focus on Banania-type images. Banania is a chocolate-banana milk flavoring popular in France, with stereotypical representations of Africans in its advertisements. Topics discussed include the violence of colonial imagery, the dangers of repetition, ways of knowing, eating the other, and alternatives.