Cultural Heritage and Popular Cultures: The Revolution Won't Be Televised And Its Global Reception

Abstract

The recent political protests unfolding in West Africa have been paralleled to the prospect of a Black Spring. However, these citizens' struggles have received a controversial media reception in the Global North and made visible a great divide between media coverage in official state-based channels and in social media. The documentary The Revolution Won' t Be Televised by Senegalese-Mauritanian filmmaker Rama Thiaw (2016) figures as a significant reference for popular cultures (such as hip-hop/rap and graffiti) in the mediatizing process of revolutions. Thiaw records the immediacy of the civil struggle before the fall of Senegal's then-president and bears an intimate testimony to the mass impact of the urban protest movement Y' en a marre. This article analyzes the inclusion of Thiaw's pan-African vision of engaged filmmaking as a supposedly political gesture in the international (African) film festival circuit. It also aims to critically outline the exhibition and reception policies of current curating trends for African cinemas.