Social Semiotics in African Films and its Effect on International Relations

Abstract

African films are mostly visual polemic couched in postcolonial dialectics. As a result, scholars tend to critically read African filmic texts with the theories of cultural studies as they negotiate the sociological significance of these visual texts. However, in a multidisciplinary world, this outlook may be considered parochial and simplistic because films, as cultural capital, embody divergent significations. This realisation makes it imperative for scholars to identify different approaches of teasing out the import of African films outside the confines of cultural studies. Such an investigation has the capacity to inspire interdisciplinary studies that will eventuate in more robust scholastic outcomes across the multitude of disciplines in academia . In furtherance of this goal, this study aims at analysing how African films have engaged the theories of International Relations and issues of international affairs through the lenses of social semiotics. Through the use of case study and textual analysis of three films - Black Girl (dir. Sembene Ousmane, 1966), Sarafina! (dir. Darrell Roodt, 1992) and Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood, 2005) - this study reveals that African films are not alienated from the significant concerns of international relations and, as a result, they can actually be used to teach and learn about International Relations. This study's outcome, in effect, suggests that scholars, whose research interest is the relatively new discipline of International Relations on films, can pontificate on theories of International Relations and understand issues of international relations not just through western films, as already canonised for this purpose by a couple of western scholars, but through African films as well. In the same vein, this study submits that the use of signs by African filmmakers is also beneficial to communication scholars and students with a major interest in semiotics.