Description

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.