Kenneth W. Harrow is Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University. He is author of Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (IUP, 2007).

"Reading these films in this manner becomes a metaphor of how one must understand African nations in a global context . . . . highly original and deeply historicized."—Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan"Kenneth W. Harrow's Trash . . . is a timely intervention in the theorization of African cinema. It is an impassioned and committed interrogation of hybridity, syncretism and cross-fertilizaiton in postcolonial cinema and one that seeks to both celebrate and renegotiate the image of the marginalized and the discarded.5.2 2014"—Transnational Cinemas"Trash brings about a fresh perspective that figures African cinema as a type of mirror of condition, a kind of cinema verité that disrupts the aesthetics of necropolitics—whether from the north or the south—and the aesthetic order of high cinema."—African Arts"Harrow's engaging book offers readers a glimpse into the trash heaps . . . squalor, and poverty that have often been depicted in African cinema since independence, but which have rarely been the object of critical study.April 2014"—African Studies Review"Trash inspires a rigorous questioning of how we think about 'Africa from below' in our scholarly research: it is a speculative, probing, provocative book filled with questions about power, exclusion, representation, and subjectivity, and about how African cinema engages social realities without necessarily serving up palatable dishes of realism or political critique."—Journal of African History"This book is a work of erudition, understanding, engagement, and enthusiastic committment to African cinema studies and literature. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice

• Preface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Bataille, Stam, and Locations of Trash2. Rancière: Aesthetics, Its Mésententes and Discontents3. The Out-of-Place Scene of Trash4. Globalization's Dumping Groun:, The Case of Trafigura5. Agency and the Mosquito: Mitchell and Chakrabarty6. Trashy Women: Karmen Gei, l'Oiseau Rebelle7. Trashy Women, Fallen Men: Fanta Nacro's "Puk Nini" and La Nuit de la vérité 8. Opening the Distribution of the Sensible: Kimberly Rivers and Trouble the Water9. Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako and the Image: Trash in Its Materiality10. The Counter-Archive for a New Postcolonial Order: O Herói and Daratt 11. Nollywood and Its Masks: Fela, Osuofia in London, and Butler's Assujetissement12. Trash's Last Leaves: Nollywood, Nollywood, NollywoodNotesBibliographyFilmographyIndex