The “Oppositional Gaze” and the Italian Cinema: Joy Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera (1968)

In this article, I explore the work of Joy Nwosu, an ethnomusicologist, musician and film scholar, who in 1968 published Cinema e Africa nera: l’immagine dei neri nel cinema bianco e il primo cinema africano visti nel 1968 (Cinema and Black Africa: The Image of Black People in White Cinema and Early African Cinema as seen in 1968). I approach Nwosu’s study, now over fifty-five years removed from its original date of publication, in order to examine the work as an example of what scholar and activist bell hooks articulates as an “oppositional gaze,” or a critical viewing practice enacted by Black women spectators. Specifically, what would it mean to acknowledge Nwosu’s study as a foundational moment of postcolonial Italian Cinema Studies thus challenging the historiography of the field? I will first outline the sociopolitical contexts of Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera, including African decolonization and its reception in Italy. I then consider the study’s significance in relation to a body of scholarship on Italian cinema and media studies attendant to racial discourse and representation, most notably those produced within the last twenty years. I argue that Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera directs us to reconsider Italian film history proper, advancing a critical race and decolonial analysis prior to the formative emergence of these fields almost two decades later.