The article concludes with a call to consider the politics of race and representation, especially the implications of racializing Africanness and who can claim the rights to representation, particularly the representation of the black African body, after 1994.Ī positive development emerged in the early 1990s in the South African film industry when the government started to see cinema as one of the institutions to forge social cohesion in the processes of democratization and development (Botha, 2005). This article also examines the articulation of black masculinity within the township space, which the author theorizes as an in-between space. By examining the various representations of black masculinities in these films, and by situating these representations within the sociohistorical and political contexts, this article complicates the overdetermined representation of the tsotsi figure that reinforces black masculinity as pathological on global screens. Both posters rely on stereotypes of the black African masculine as dangerous, deviant, and violent. This article begins with the examination of two film posters used to promote Tsosti and The Wooden Camera in France. Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2003) in order to complicate the manner in which an authentic black African masculinity has become conflated with the tsotsi (gangster) figure in South African cinema. Gavin Hood, 2005) and The Wooden Camera (dir.

'This article examines the various representations of black masculinities in the films Tsotsi (dir.

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