Main Article Content
Abstract
In the wave of industrialization and internationalization of the Chinese Film Industry, the Chinese blockbuster ‘Operation Red Sea’ burst out as the 2018’s revelation in terms of quality standards and visual effects. The movie starred a Chinese navy team, ‘Jiaolong’, made of eight highly-trained and well-armed commandos to protect overseas Chinese nationals, rescue hostages, and handle a terrorist organization involved in nuclear weapons’ deals. However, Africa is featured as the film’s background story, and warfare actions’ playground, displaying to the domestic and world audience the old made-up clichés of Africa blended with war, terrorism, piracy and desert. Meanwhile, in the same year, Hollywood released ‘Black Panther’, a blockbuster which as well featured Africa as the film’s background story and actions’ playground, but that surprisingly overturned Hollywood’s century-old tradition of picturing a dark Africa full of political turmoil, wars, famine, diseases and illegal migrations. It also downplayed Marvel’s obsession with ‘White Super-heroism’. With regards to these paradigms shifts, the article, through a comparative study of the two hits mentioned above, aims at highlighting the media portrayal of Africa on American and Chinese screens, digging out the motives behind Hollywood upturn on Africa’s narrative, and identifying possible solutions for the Chinese Film Industry to improve its experience of ‘African thematic movies’ while avoiding Hollywood’s past mistakes.
Keywords: Media portrayal of Africa, African thematic movies, Hollywood, Chinese film industry, Black Panther, Operation Red Sea.
Article Details
Copyright (c) 2021 TALING TENE RODRIGUE
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).