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Dr Zélie Asava is a lecturer, author and public speaker on race, gender and representation in screen studies.

“Zélie Asava’s Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France is an important contribution to mixed race studies, because representation is treated as the source of identity, rather than its effect. Asava focuses on female black-white mixed race in film, from the tragic mulatta figure, through passing, over the 20th century, and shows how these earlier tropes continue into our own “post-binary” times. Fascinating, seductive, suffering, passive, and triumphant, these racially ambiguous actors and their characters timelessly reflect and create broad human conditions of provincialism, cosmopolitanism, oppression, liberation, grief, and joy. Mixed Race Cinemas should be required reading for all students of race and gender, as well as those who appreciate film.” –  Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon, USA


“Zélie Asava makes an important contribution with this smartly researched study of mixed race representation in U.S. and French films. Her analysis of relevant films and the mixed racial politics of these two national cinemas is cogent and sharply illuminating.” –  Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Austin, USA and co-editor, Mixed Race Hollywood


“Zélie Asava is a bold new voice in cinematic and mixed-race studies. She follows up her path-breaking first book, The Black Irish Onscreen, with Mixed Race Cinemas, a trenchant examination of mixed-race figures in nearly a century of French and American film, from the movies of Oscar Micheaux to mixed-race sci-fi. Her writing is grounded in but not burdened by theory and offers a fine-grained gender analysis. In offering sometimes startling insights, she deepens our understandings of the different racial systems that have evolved in each of these countries. This is a terrific book.” –  Paul Spickard, Professor of History and Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA




Geopolitical Paralysis in Sembene’s satire Xala (1975)

Adapted from legendary Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene’s 1973 novel, Xala is a visually stunning satire which plays on themes of corruption, inequality and shame via symbolic hyper-realism. Xala uses humour to expose the harsh realities of neo-colonialism in 1970s Senegal, an enduring state of enforced dependency on the former colonising power regarding aid, education, military,…

Inhabiting the Inbetween: Isabelle Boni-Clavérie’s Pour la nuit

The 2005 short film Pour la nuit, directed by Isabelle Boni-Clavérie, presents a personal exploration of the mixed family.  The film is set overnight in Marseilles, a symbolically and literally transnational space (as both passage to Africa and multicultural French city).  The director Karim Dridi set his film Bye bye (1995) in Marseilles because: ‘Setting…

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