ABSTRACT

One of the most successful fictions produced about African dictatorship in recent years is Kevin MacDonald's film The Lust King of Scotland, loose adaptation of Giles Foden's popular novel of the same title about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada. The success of The Last King of Scotland highlights a crucial aspect of representations of African dictatorships: their potential appeal as products of popular culture, mass entertainment. The Last King of Scotland stands somewhere in-between, and is mostly considered 'middlebrow' entertainment, as suggested by its success in mainstream award competitions and the absence of reviews in publications such as Screen or Les Cahiers du cinema. The chapter shows that perceptions of aesthetic value are indeed central to the way we experience filmic or literary texts. Building on the analysis of filmic portrayals of Idi Amin, it also shows that the attempts to judge artistic representations in apparently extra-aesthetic terms are primarily shaped by various kinds of aesthetic considerations.