Approaches to African cinema study: Defining other boundaries

All too often critiques of African cinema have presupposed a cultural homogeneity that is often false or at least so porous as to yield few meaningful insights. In this chapter I take a different approach, one that is based on cultural differentiation. This is because I believe it is time for us to examine African cinema based not on notions of nation states or colonial linguistic groupings, but of more distinctive cultural characteristics. For example, the South African academic/critic Keyan Tomaselli argues for orality as one of the defining characteristics of narrative patterns in Southern African cinema