EDITORIAL

In this issue of the Journal of African Cinemas, a mix of transnational and cross-regional scholars discuss documentary cinemas and African stories. Beyond the erstwhile hotly debated question of the positionalities of Global North and Global South in the production of theory, these scholars offer a sutured argumentation that usurps this intellectual duel. The discussions enliven a transnational debate centred on the documentation of Africa in world cinema history, critique and galas. Tangential to this idea of documenting African cinemas is a most respected iconic figure – the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus Kenneth Harrow – who significantly advanced scholarship on African cinemas despite his Global North affiliations. The issue features two Obituaries on Harrow, written by his intellectual peers, celebrating his generous personality and intermediary role as a border-less intellectual. There are also three book reviews. The first is about Kenneth Harrow’s unique book, which correlates African cinema with space and time quantum theories. The second review is on the history of Africa’s sidelined clas-sic cinemas, a book by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy. The third review focuses on a recently published auto-ethnographic scholarship on South Africa’s prolific filmmaker, Richard Green, and a leading scholar, Keyan Tomaselli. All these discussions are closely anchored on global interlinkages in the critique of how Africa is documented in documentary cinemas of human stories and wildlife filmmaking, in Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) generative technologies, and diverse global assemblies.