Documentary Objectives

Name: Documentary Objectives
Price: 277 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9780253074799

Filming Africa from Colonialism to Independence

Rachel Gabara

$277

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We will update you on expected arrival time to us. If this delay is too long, please let us know within 2 business days and we can give you options regarding cancelling or adjusting your order. More details on cancelling your order can be found in our Terms of Trade.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Indiana University Press
03 February 2026

Film theory & criticism; Documentary movies & films; African history

For over a century, filmmakers have been shooting documentaries in West and Central Africa, a region that included the colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa and now encompasses fourteen nations and nearly 200 million people. Documentary Objectives offers a rich history of these films, until now largely ignored by scholars. Author Rachel Gabara shows the crucial role they played in the development of both European and African cinemas, arguing that their recovery as a nonfiction tradition transforms our understanding of documentary itself.

Gabara's book traces fifty years of French colonial documentary in sub-Saharan Africa – propaganda-infused travel, hunting, expedition, and ethnographic films. After independence, African directors reclaimed their cinematic image by challenging outsider claims to authenticity and developing new models for nonfiction. Gabara highlights the nearly forgotten innovations of early decades and analyzes recent works that have attracted a wider audience on the continent and internationally. In a complex network of images and languages and across a dynamic range of styles, African documentarists have remade a global art form rooted in oppression, exoticization, and a simplistic conception of filmic realism.

By recounting a history of nonfiction film in which Europe and Africa were inextricably linked, Documentary Objectives brings together traditions that have been both marginalized and kept apart, charting new ground in the disciplines of Film Studies, African Studies, and French and Francophone Studies.

By: Rachel Gabara
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780253074799
ISBN 10: 0253074797
Pages: 354
Publication Date: 03 February 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Rachel Gabara is the Nancy Gillespie Brinning Professor in French at the University of Georgia. She is author of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person.

Reviews for Documentary Objectives: Filming Africa from Colonialism to Independence

""Documentary Objectives is a groundbreaking work, both archival and critical: a tour de force from one of the most meticulous, most accomplished writers on non-fiction film in Africa.""—Sada Niang, author of Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations ""Documentary Objectives is an ingenious intervention into the terms of documentary cinema through French coloniality and the dynamic register of postcoloniality no longer tethered to Western conceptions of self and other. The description and interpretation of historical and contemporary documentary francophone African films are presented as a point of inflection and reinvention well beyond limited conceptions of the rest. Gabara's contribution deeply enriches our understanding of the futures of postcolonial documentary media.""—Peter J. Bloom, author of French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism