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A place that matters yet: John Gubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the postcolonial world

scope is that at times, certain issues are raised briefly, and then glossed over without detailed explication. Questions raised by the book in embryonic form include: what is the relationship between publics constituted by a circulating film and its secondary texts, on the one hand, and the space of a general “public sphere” on the other? What is the relationship between publics engendered by the shared experience of attending the cinema, and publics activated by the circulating secondary texts? If, as Modisane suggests, there is a specificity to the medium of film in its verisimilitude and indexical quality, then this suggests that the kinds of public engendered through watching the film itself and merely reading secondary texts about the film do indeed differ. Modisane hints at the role of affective experience enabled by watching the film itself in catalysing a critical disposition in relation to the issues raised, especially in constituting non-expert publics. However, the question remains as to how the affective experience of watching the film might relate to reasoned debates within the newspapers and magazines around the film. The very methodological challenge of accessing the critical debates engendered by those who watched the film but didn’t write into newspapers or magazines seems to suggest a different kind of publicness. What kinds of exclusions might hamper the universal participation promised by the concept of the “public sphere” in relation to the public lives of films? The description of Gerard Sekoto’s painting that Modisane opens with is suggestive in this regard, which depicts a group of women who cannot afford the entrance price to the travelling dance show illicitly peering in at the performance, sharing in its publicness to a certain degree, but excluded from full participation. Renegade Reels prompts scholars to grapple with these questions. It is a carefully researched, compellingly argued addition to scholarly literature on media in Africa, with its own “critical potency” prompting further investigation of the Habermasian concept of the public sphere within contexts outside of eighteenth-century Europe; the specific conjuncture of state, market and circulating media objects within these various contexts; and the role of film, with its capacity to prompt both intellectual and embodied responses, within these trajectories.