Odile Goerg, Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial West Africa, trans. Melissa Thackway (original) (raw)

Tropical Dream Palaces is a thoroughly informative history of moving images’ circulation in the French and British colonies of West Africa from the mid 1910s to the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s. Building on unprecedentedly vast bilingual research spanning over a decade, Odile Goerg surveys archives ranging from the French National Archives, Overseas (Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer) to the Public Records Office in London, and from the National Archives of Burkina Faso (Archives Nationales du Burkina Faso) to Ghana’s Public Records and Archives Administration Department. Offsetting inevitable gaps in documentation and archival paucity, the pages of Tropical Dream Palaces are peppered with excerpts of fictionalized accounts, such as Tierno Monénembo’s Cinema, and interviews with a broad variety of film spectators and professionals (including filmmaker Med Hondo).1 This book contributes to the history of colonial cinema, a field defined in the English-speaking context by the work of scholars such as Priya Jaikumar, Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, and more recently Tom Rice.2 Unlike most earlier studies, Goerg’s book foregrounds the question of African spectators’ reception. As she recounts, until the emergence of independent local productions, African audiences were exposed mainly to moving images produced in the West, except for a small number of Egyptian films, popular in the French colonies with larger Muslim populations, and Hindi films, initially introduced by Indian traders to cater to their own communities in East Africa. Yet as Goerg observes, if cinema often relayed racist imageries and colonial propaganda, it almost inadvertently also gave individuals ‘a political arena fostered by the darkness of the theatres and the unpredictability of audience reactions, which the censors could hardly foresee’ (pp. 10–11). From Dakar to Abidjan, local audiences fell in love with cinema, appropriating its narratives and spaces to subvert colonial hierarchies and power, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. While the question of film reception in colonial Africa admittedly remains elusive, Tropical Dream Palaces offers a series of archival coordinates and testimonies that help to situate site-, time- and culturally specific forms of spectatorships, and will certainly prove seminal to future research.