ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates how the south-north border is being reimagined in the wake of Africa’s rapid urbanisation, large-scale human migration and precarisation, energy crises and neoliberal economic restructuring. It starts by discussing a classic postcolonial text, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), in order to measure the distance that separates us from Said’s outline of modern imperialism and its culture and geopolitics. While Said historicised the twentieth century shift of global hegemony from Europe to the United States, the first decades of the new millennium have seen a sustained challenge to the western-centric paradigm of global modernity and the repositioning of Africa and the global south as the new frontiers of neoliberal capitalism. This historical trajectory frames a discussion of two contemporary African films, Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s neo-noir thriller Viva Riva! (2011) and Neill Blomkamp’s Johannsburg-set science fiction movie District 9 (2009). The chapter argues that the African urban landscapes represented in these films are legible as dystopian images of the planet’s future.
