Addamms Songe MUTUTA

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on postcolonial African cinemas and visual cultures, exploring how film serves as a philosophical and cultural lens for understanding Africa’s social, political, and epistemic realities. He is Co-editor of the Journal of African Cinemas and author of Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema (Routledge, 2022). His work spans African film theory, post-apartheid cultural studies, and transnational African visualities.

I am a researcher committed to the service of the global academic community, with a keen interest in advancing African studies. I pursue innovative multidisciplinary approaches, theories, concepts, and frameworks to grow the understanding of Africa and its diasporic communities, local and transnational cultures, postcolonial experiences and imaginations, visual and cultural products, and all aspects of Africanness, broadly imagined. I research and teach African Cinemas, with a keen effort towards interdisciplinary knowledge based on African Cinemas.  My main questions seek a philosophical entry point into this process, using African Cinemas as the raw material for theory building, social and cultural critique.

Broadly, I research cinema of crisis in Africa today, using postcolonial African cinemas to develop new cultural theories and epistemologies in the broad areas of postcolonial citizenship, politics, governance, race, social lives, and cognate ideas such as epistemic cultures of injustice, historical revisionism, and ideas of Africa. My research is interdisciplinary, focused on postcolonial African cinemas and the philosophical reflections they enable - broadly conceptualised. I, however, strongly lean towards South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Cinema Cultures, where I have a continuous research interest in developing complementary theories of apartheid/post-apartheid, embodied injustices, cultural ecotones, errancy, epistemological and ethno-graphic ideas of cinema images, spatial racial registers, multiphrenic identities, township as a non-entity, reductionism and postapartheid cultures, township subcultures, Sisyphean existentialism, Afrophobia and xenophobia.

Beyond South African contemporary cinema, I have research interests in the foundations of postcolonial cinema and theory. I have written on Algerian cinema and postcolonial theory; nationhood, iconicity, and motherhood in South Sudan, cultural nationalism and Lost Boys phenomena in South Sudan; representations of fuel smuggling and rent economy in Kinshasa, occluded citizenship in Cairo, child soldiers and war cinema in Monrovia, sidelined citizens in Luanda, cultural nationalism in Nairobi, and gender microaggressions in Dar es Salaam cinema. Geographically, then, my research has covered cinema from numerous African countries: Egypt, Liberia, DRC Congo, Angola, South Africa, Kenya, and South Sudan. My research in Postcolonial African cinemas thus addresses contemporary questions of postcolonial crises, identity, nation and nationalism, research cultures, anthropological image theories, cultural globalisation, transnationalism and migrant cultures, and other aspects broadly construed as postcolonial phenomena.

My goal is to popularise research on African cinemas as a platform that commands comparable significance to the continent’s folklore cultures, and therefore a serious platform to situate research on Africa’s contemporary epistemologies. Alongside my research efforts dedicated to this end, I co-edit the Journal of African Cinemas (https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-african-cinemas), where I am committed to empowering and growing research in the broad area of African Cinemas, locally and from the diasporas. My latest monograph is Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003122098).