Introduction

This chapter provides the book’s background, including its aim, which is to examine how gendered local and global power dynamics interact in complex ways to influence fictional and biographical cinematic representations of African women and girls who participate in or are affected by African political conflicts. The chapter also outlines the theoretical framework consisting of concepts and theories relevant to understanding the impact of ideological and other influences on the representations of African women and girls affected by political conflicts. The chapter introduces the decolonial feminist cultural approach, the method of analysis proposed in this book, which combines the cultural approach, African feminist approach and contrapuntal method. It demonstrates how the decolonial feminist cultural approach offers a means to conduct a nuanced analysis of case study films that is inter-textual, intersectional and decolonial. The chapter also demonstrates how the decolonial feminist cultural approach provides a tool to deconstruct the universalising tendencies of colonial and neocolonial knowledge. The chapter concludes by presenting the book outline and a summary of each chapter.