African Video Movies and Global Desires

Carmela Garritano is an associate professor of Africana Studies and Film Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research has been supported by grants from Fulbright IIE and the West African Research Association.

"Rarely does a book come along that opens up an entirely new world in cinema studies. This sophisticated volume, a groundbreaking book for a number of reasons, does just that…. Summing Up: Highly recommended." (Choice) "An extremely important contribution to the field of African media studies. Garritano's work is not only the first monograph to focus on Ghanaian video movies, it also adds to ongoing conversations about postcolonial visual cultures, globalization, consumerism, and African gender dynamics…. Garritano has written what might easily be the first feminist monograph on popular African screen media." (Black Camera) "A satisfying and authoritative account…. Garritano situates Ghana's video industries within complex global flows of capital, neo- liberal economies, and their effects on desire and subjectivity…. The book's scope and conceptual framing will be familiar and useful to readers in other areas of film and media studies." (African Arts) "In this impressive work, it is clear that the close analyses of the various visual texts and their respective subject matter are informed by both solid ethnographic fieldwork insights and the supple application of theoretical perspectives from film and literary studies…. When Ghanaian popular culture studies does become an established subfield in African studies, this book should definitely be required reading." (Cinema Journal) "This book is a forerunner in the excavation and understanding of the Ghanaian video movie industry's emergence out of neoliberal economic policies over the past two decades. It highlights the struggles and tensions between Ghana's dynamic local, national, and regional video movie industries. Garritano brings to light the contemporary paradoxical struggle of Ghanaian video movies' attempts to creatively re-frame and confront 'the grand narratives of modernity and globalization' while simultaneously often being complicit to such forces." (African Studies Quarterly) "With African Video Movies and Global Desires, Carmela Garritano has established her place among the major interpreters of contemporary African video films…whose groundbreaking work has served to establish a new field of cinema studies and a new approach to African Cinema." (African Studies Review) "This is an excellent book: admirably sophisticated, solid, cogent, purposeful, and fine-grained. It is built on an enormous amount of careful research … and fieldwork of a depth that only a very few other researchers on African film can match." "[This book] makes an extremely important contribution to African film, media, and cultural studies more generally with the way in which it focuses its close film analyses through the lens of gender."