Isabel Balseiro – författare

With the end of apartheid, South African cinema is at a turning point in its history. This collection offers an exploration of a film industry that has excluded its country's black majority, in both representation and production - and which now must overcome collusion between racist ideology and film form. Until recently, filmmakers could work only within a culture that reluctantly took black South Africans into account. Therefore, to explore what South African cinema has been and could become, the authors do not limit their discussion to film production but approach cinema as a manifestation of cultural history. How has the purpose of cinema been viewed at different times in South Africa, by different governments and social groups? What is the relation between film and a sense of nationhood in South Africa? Such questions lead to a consideration not only of films made by South Africans in South Africa but also of an unfolding film culture within a series of stages that have yet to give rise to a national cinema.

These seventeen pieces on travel in Africa by leading African authors take readers to places at once homelike and foreign. Against the tropes of travel writing, this book offers the acuity of vision of particular types of travelers. These are travelers whose mother tongue may find the hint of familiarity across otherwise unintelligible languages and for whom a foreign land isn’t necessarily strange; in it they perceive vestiges of the familiar. For them, the act of traveling extends a canvas on which to depict someone else’s reality—a reality never too distant from their own. What makes these writings coalesce is a reflection about the act of being in motion, about reconfiguring place; a consciousness of how geography redirects the focus of one’s gaze and, in turn, how that altered gaze filters inward. Having absorbed the landscape, inhaled the scents, paid heed to accents, and accepted the condition of being out of place, these travelers reconstitute individual consciousness and join a collective sense of existing beyond borders. Place inhabits this renewed sense of self; literature enables its expression. An inviting introduction to travel writing on Africa, The Passport That Does Not Pass Ports is absorbing reading for travelers and students of literature alike.