Ousmane Sembène, La Noire de…, 1966.

The recognition assigned to Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1966) and its participation in the emergence of Third Cinema and more specifically West African film has been discussed in the international press, scholarly journals, countless classrooms across the academy, and community film clubs for half a century. The many critical conversations and publications on the significance of Sembène’s film are meaningful and in large part surround the ways in which Black Girl gives voice and image to the cinematically voiceless and visibly marginalized. A common thread found in scholarly essays of Black Girl observe how Sembène’s auteurist signature supplies a “counter cinema” to European images of Africa, African communities, and particularly Senegalese people. Sembène’s work is now more than ever accessible and available to readers and viewers producing “sharp awareness of global political reality.”¹ Sembène’s oeuvre and specifically Black Girl introduce Third Cinema and anticipate Western media’s ongoing disenfranchisement of postcolonial communities in the emerging global era.² Film critic Stephen Crofts argues West African filmmakers Safi Faye, François Woukoache, Adama Drabo, Jean-Marie Teno follow Sembène in serving “notice of the ongoing importance of Third Cinema as a cinema of political and aesthetic opposition.”³ As a key creative voice of Third Cinema, Sembène’s films recognize “the many-layeredness of [Senegalese] cultural-historical formations, with each layer being shaped by complex connections between intra- and inter-national forces and traditions.”⁴ Many critics have identified Sembène’s appropriation of French New Wave stylistics, the disembodied voice-over, handheld camera, and jump cut uniquely articulating Diouana’s (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) subject position. 

Over the decades, critics have celebrated Black Girl’s themes of cultural dislocation, political disenfranchisement, and ambivalent national loyalties bearing out feelings of global displacement through representations of Senegalese and French families. These uncertain feelings of belonging illustrate opportunism and fear operating in a former era of internationalism: the decolonization of Africa following World War II. Taken today, more than two decades since the end of the Cold War, themes of advantaged and disadvantaged mobility resonate with the conditions and feelings of present-day globalization: guest worker migratory flows and refugee crises spurred by political, economic, and environmental catastrophes. Anthony Kwame Appiah observes the way media systems create “imaginative engagements.”⁵ Embracing a type of non-nationality in the global era, Appiah posits tolerance for differences can be achieved through an exchange of each citizen’s local particularities, whether national, ethnic, religious, or some other facet of identity construction, mediated encounters trade in the ideas of each other’s respective regionalism and promote tolerance. No doubt with the proliferation of media technologies and the ubiquity of communication networks viewers around the world come in contact with emerging and established cinematic forms articulating the movements and aspirations of global communities. Sembène’s Black Girl is now digitized, more available than ever, and a vital resource for imaginative engagements. 

The backdrop of Sembène’s 1960s era film surrounds newly independent Senegal and the influence of Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Negritude Movement seeking to reclaim notions of African heritage after centuries of European colonization: the taking of land, forced labor, and instituting European languages as the mechanisms of colonial violence and cultural imperialism. The context of African decolonization also involves the Cold War’s bifurcation of the globe into so-called pro-Western democracies and Soviet-style Marxist counter forces. Marshall McLuhan identified this geopolitical climate as a “global village” creating a hyper-awareness of others as an effect of broadcast systems collapsing the sense of distance and creating immediacy across cultures.⁶ For postcolonial critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “advances in electronic technology have made it possible for ‘the West’ (McLuhan) or ‘telematic society’ (Lyotard) to go back to the possibility of precapitalist spiritual riches without their attendant discomforts.”⁷ Black Girl is emblematic of ways emerging global media of the 1960s produces diverse and discontinuous perspectives antagonizing legacies of European violence in the Africa. Europe in the 1960s accelerated decolonization in the effort to rebuild European nations into global powers by contracting its network of West African colonial relations, to include Senegal, Algeria, Mali (French Sudan), Mauritania, and the Ivory Coast. 

Speaking to the historical and political context of decolonization at the Tricontinental Conference of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America in Havana, Cuba, in 1966, Amilcar Cabral argued for the importance of theory to explain the foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structures.⁸ Cabral’s original call takes aim at the extensions of the colonial system still in operation through international aid and “development” projects suggested to upraise the conditions of formerly colonized groups. Development funds, trade agreements, and so forth reinvent metropole-satellite systems of control by producing domestic classes with loyalties to funding streams largely made available by the former colonial authority or a similarly empowered relation. Cabral reads new Euro-American apparatuses of control as ways the West produces separations within the emergent postcolonial nation crippling independence movements and fracturing public sentiment. Black Girl stages these macro-institutions of global power behind familial discourses by focusing on Diouana’s estrangement from her Senegalese family, ambivalence toward Senegal’s independence, and preference to work for and live with a French family in Antibes. 

African and European familial displacement is one narrative structure short-shifted, understated, or ignored in many readings of Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl. The family resituates an analysis of staying power of colonialism and the contradictions of postcolonial resistance. The film describes familial discourses contemplating new globalities and reporting new engagements between Europeans and Africans, as each reimagine the shifting and mobile international scene fraught with opportunity and loss. Diouana’s mobility juxtaposes with her mother’s (un-credited) immobility and the French family’s reduced movements abroad signifying travel as a new historical condition enabled by decolonization. Michel Foucault describes family as a “local center” where “distributions of power” and “appropriations of knowledge” do not solely reinforce established hierarchies but move across and expose the family’s expansive discursive power.⁹ The “western” family, in Foucault’s theory, articulates positions in-line with and contesting ideologies asserted by other institutions comprising a nation’s superstructure: religion, government, law, media, education, and so on are components of society to which family is another participating member. The family positioned at the locus of discussions of internationalism enables viewers to discover attitudes, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors entangling empowered and disempowered groups, and imagine how private conversations in the home refract opinions circulating throughout the world at large. In celebrating Sembène’s film, Akin Adesokin recognizes how the artist “intended to make the readers or audiences see the values of their heritage, which centuries of slavery and colonialism had discredited or destroyed, and to use such insights to find their bearings in the world of here-and-now.”¹⁰ Black Girl instructs audiences by localizing the opportunism and fear, stress testing established hierarchies policed and maintained within familial structures. The family is therefore part of a discursive system informing attitudes and feelings about citizenship rights, and hierarchies of privileged and marginalized mobility as borders are reimagined during decolonization. 

The French and Senegalese families depicted in Black Girl are members of what Louis Althusser identifies as “Ideological State Apparatuses” supporting inequities around the world.¹¹ Familial power relations refract changing attitudes across the international scene forming impressions about disempowered and financially mobile communities. French and African families in Black Girl present conflicting viewpoints playing across geographies of desire. The French family prefers the colony because it provides opportunities to upraise their social position while Diouana believes living and working in Europe signals her acceptance in a modern culture. Sembène’s cinematic structures enable and disable Diouana’s ability to speak and address audiences heretofore largely denied contact with postcolonial subjectivities; this point has largely sustained the praise assigned to the film. Aijaz Ahmad’s criticism of the way “Third World Literature” plays out in the Western imagination is helpful to recognize the importance of the film then and now. Viewers of Black Girl should not read the film as a “national allegory” subsuming complexities of Senegalese independence into a melodrama of familial images describing machinations of world power but as “relations between private and public, personal and communal.”¹² Families engage other superstructures and are vital agents in the formation of thought, feeling, and opinion of others: the foreign, the margin, the periphery, the local and the remote take shape through private conversations in the home. It is in domestic spaces that the globe is imagined.

Black Girl unfolds through a series of flashback and flash-forward dissolves shifting viewer perspectives between Antibes, central Dakar, and Diouana’s village on the outskirts of the city. In the second flashback to Dakar tracing Diouana’s decision to accept Madam’s (Anne Marie Jelinek) offer to work in Europe, Sembène dissolves from the long shot situating Diouana’s confinement in Antibes to a series of exterior shots describing her optimism at the prospect of leaving newly independent Senegal. The first shot reports the location by capturing the sign “Place de l’Independence” while Diouana walks with her boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene) and announces how Madam bought her a dress and suitcase. Rachel Langford observes how Sembène’s images and voiceover conflict with each other “silencing the African by depicting a passive Diouana unable to speak on her behalf” yet offers “a neo-colonised African ‘I’ to frame a travelogue memoir.”¹³ The scene commemorating Senegal’s independence from French rule features Diouana expressing the way systems of subordination persist through familial behaviors. Madam’s gift to Diouana and offer to work in France signals “recognition and acceptance into a community that seemed impenetrable.”¹⁴ Diouana imagines the gift from a European woman represents a gesture of an elevated class position and therefore rejects the spirit of optimism sensed by Senegalese independence. In a response of gratitude, Diouana buys an authentic African mask to give to Madam from a village boy on the promise of future wages; this engagement between Madam and Diouana describes different forms of mobility and privilege. Diouana believes she can achieve a level of freedom unattainable in Senegal through her association with Madam and the French family. This relationship confuses international class differences by suggesting a kind of shared social position with all women, minimizing class and ethnic borders between African and European communities and the legacy of imperialism still shaping this relationship. What Diouana initially interprets as inclusion becomes reimagined as a condition of servitude to the French family. 

In the same scene, Sembène’s long shots continue to place Diouana in Dakar’s cityscape where her thoughts take flight from the local, urban milieu: the line “All I could think of was the trip ahead” underscores the walk through Dakar’s esplanade. Diouana’s thoughts of an impending trip to France interact with a series of edits describing her boyfriend grabbing her breast while taking a photo like tourists in their homeland. Iterations of internationalism, imagining an elsewhere made to feel nearer by media systems revises perception of the domestic sphere and produces feelings of displacement and dislocation within native communities. Strolling through newly independent Dakar is like visiting another country without the prospects for a better life; thus, the street scene appearing as a courtship actually transforms into a romantic breakup. The fissure between the young Senegalese couple over differing perceptions of opportunity after French rule disrupts familial possibilities at home for Diouana and her boyfriend. Diouana’s appearance in public spaces honoring Senegal’s liberation rejects postcolonial optimism as an imposition to the prospects of freedom and opportunity she imagines elsewhere.

Shifting international conditions invites the imagination to ruminate about possibilities beyond national, cultural, and social borders. Competing opinions of what Diouana’s life would be like in France deepen the tensions of belonging on display in Black Girl. As Diouana sheds her boyfriend’s grasp she repeats “All I can think of was my trip. I was going to France.” At which point her boyfriend catches up with her, grabs her hand, but Diouana promptly withdraws. The sequence draws her feeling of subordination within gender hierarchies that independence from France does not appear to weaken. The images that follow emphasize how divisions within postcolonial cultures persist through allegiances with the former colonizer. Diouana dances on Senegal’s independence monument and shouts “To France, to France” while traversing the memorial honoring those who served the newly independent nation. Here again, Sembène performs another flashback interrupting Diouana’s offensive public display with images of Léopold Sédar Senghor placing a wreath at the memorial sight. The series of flashbacks returns to another moment in time showcasing divided loyalties through Diouana’s preference for Senegal’s former colonizer juxtaposed with newsreel images commemorating the nation’s independence. Intercutting footage of an official government ceremony at the location of Diouana’s declarations for a better life publicly downgrades the optimism assigned to Senegalese independence. In one sense, Diouana imagines her boyfriend thinks serving as a governess for French children is akin to “domestic slavery.” Diouana’s performance at the memorial infuriates her boyfriend as a violation and insult to the struggle for African liberation from European colonization. 

Yet, Diouana’s mother’s voice reverberates in her thinking urging her to leave Senegal for France where personal opportunity appears more possible. Behaviors exhibited by the French and Senegalese family toward Diouana’s departure describe attitudes about mobility and citizenship at the onset of an earlier iteration of twentieth century internationalism. The series of external shots in Dakar marking the days before Diouana leaves for Antibes occurs well after audiences experience the degrading domestic servitude reported in the French family’s home earlier in the film. Thoughts and feelings operating through the family contribute to attitudes about citizenship and belonging: social mobility promised by independence makes migration and emigration more possible yet still relegates the woman figure as less than full citizen. For Diouana and her mother, national independence legitimizes citizenship rights at the same time re-instantiates social hierarchies delimiting the rights of groups within the national community. A newly independent homeland does not ensure the upward mobility of a village girl; her mother’s impoverished life stand as evidence of the limitations of women motivating Diouana’s departure. By borrowing attributes of French art cinema and deploying aesthetics to express experiences of postcolonial subjectivity, Black Girl stages a counter idea to the West’s story of African subsistence by describing a Senegalese woman with international ambitions of her own. 

Sembène’s film engages African decolonization through a woman’s subject positions to describe the ambiguities of belonging, uncertain citizenship rights, and cultural ambivalence. 

The French title, La Noire de…, contains an ambiguity lost in the English translation, Black Girl. The ellipsis following the preposition de leaves unspecified whether that de means from, that is to say, coming from a specific place, or whether it is the possessive of. The latter would indicate that the black “girl” is someone’s property. The ellipsis evokes both meanings in French.¹⁵ 

“Black Girl” signifies a kind of global non-citizenship where places of belonging for subaltern womanhood do not exist. Senegal’s nationhood status suggests greater possibilities are now imaginable beyond borders. For the French family, decolonization contracts mobility and reduces privileged forms of citizenship. Madam is principally responsible for recruiting Diouana to Antibes as the family withdraws from Senegal and returns to France. Madam selects Diouana for not appearing too desperate or destitute, and thus her behavior more closely resembles the privilege social position of her mistress than her fellow countrywomen seeking work. Being chosen apart from other Senegalese offers Diouana the chance to leave the limitations of newly independent nation and pursue possibilities in France. 

The luncheon scene in Antibes serves to illustrate how the French family and their guests re-instantiate attitudes claiming the inferiority of emerging postcolonial nations as affluent European mobility seems to have been diminished in the bargain. A series of images describing Diouana washing dishes, hanging laundry, and wondering why “the doors are all shut day and night, night and day.” This conveys the strictures of her life in France and reduced movements within French communities. A long shot confines Diouana to the central third of the film frame as she mops the floor in the dress, wig, and high heels Madam supplied in the effort to recruit Diouana as a childcare worker. Madam then enters the long shot scolding Diouana for appearing overdressed for work and returns with an apron for her to wear to remind Diouana of her guest worker class position within the French home. Lieve Spass asserts the primary antagonism in the film exists between Diouana and Madam as each represent marginalized women in relation to the male subject position.¹⁶ A quick dissolve to and from a black screen again recaptures Diouana in the kitchen thinking through her servitude: “Why the apron? Why am I in this house?” Diouana questions why the family wants her to cook Senegalese stew and rice for party guests. Her voiceover thinks through how the French family seeks to retain its privileged social position by employing a servant class to upraise conditions of domestic life. Diouana and Madam negotiate revising social hierarchies happening in the home as newly mobile groups take advantage of the opportunities posed by internationalism. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan observe how Western women’s travels “can obscure complicated class and ethnic distinctions […] as well as the history of both pro- and anti-imperialist activities.”¹⁷ Madam and Diouana share an overlapping class status as woman figures, yet Madam disrupts this shared position by demeaning Diouana; thus, Madam’s social position elevates but only in the presence and inclusion of nonwhite women.

A dissolve to the dinner table opens the luncheon scene where the French family and guests treat Diouana as an object of possession. The guests transfer the geographies of desire seemingly foreclosed under the French colonial system giving way to independence movements to the Senegalese woman right in their grasp. As the luncheon guests turn their attention to Diouana seeking her services, the voiceover takes flight again as Diouana desires to experience Cannes, Monte Carlo, and the opulent French resorts depicted in magazines. Sembène frames the dinner table cutting across the screen with the mask Diouana gifted the family hanging on the apartment wall in the background. The mask decorating the apartment evokes persistent attitudes of superiority sustained by the French family after France’s withdrawal from its African colony. Diouana and the mask bring Africa into the home mitigating the French family’s downgraded social status signaled by decolonization. Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “Prayer to Masks” poetically claims “The Africa of the empires is dying: see the agony of a pitiful princess/ And Europe too where we are joined at the navel.”¹⁸ The poem frames strained attachments across continents through images of motherhood and womanliness that Sembène’s film situates through familial encounters. 

Diouana’s imagination again takes flight contemplating all the fineries available to her once the family pays her. Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) soon announces “Genuine African cooking” and Madam rings the dinner bell disrupting Diouana’s thoughts of elsewhere calling her back to the dining room for more rice and wine. Medium shots of dinner guests frame leisure classes consuming Senegalese cultural traditions to define European privilege. In a criticism of British Heritage cinema and its participation in the colonizing Africa, bell hooks theorizes “that to eat black food is a way to say ‘death, I am eating you’ and thereby conquering fear and acknowledging power.”¹⁹ For the French family and their guests, consuming cultural differences reassigns sensations of reduced mobility to a reinvigorated imperial desire. As networks of French colonial relations contract, the French family reinvents privilege and combats this fear by re-appropriating traditions of others under its roof. Notice in the exchange at the dinner table how the French family leverages their experiences abroad to sway affections and esteem from their friends. “A bit more,” one guest asks off screen, to which Monsieur replies, “You must visit Dakar.” Stymied by narrowing geographies of desire transfers to sexual desire when the older male guest asks if mafé and rice are aphrodisiacs, and then he promptly seeks to kiss Diouana. The permitted and encouraged behavior evinces attitudes harbored by the French family that re-appropriate desire to inhabit an elsewhere to an urge to possess objects redefining how they imagined empowerment. 

The conversation turns to African independence and its effect on African people suggesting gestures of inclusion and superiority produce resentment. “Their independence has made them less natural,” Monsieur quips. The remark resonates with ideas asserted in Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” (1899) obliging European classes the responsibility to upraise the conditions of nonwhite groups subsisting elsewhere. These deeply entrenched attitudes legitimize the Europe’s colonization of Africa. Diouana’s guest worker status takes advantage of foreign travel, asks little from her hosts, while her movements in France seem restricted. These luncheon exchanges expose attitudes within well-to-do class positions whereby the upward mobility of some groups signals the downgraded status of others. This zero-sum game view of the world posits there are limited resources available to all groups; the improved status of one person or community must accompany the reduced status of another. Thus, Diouana symbolizes subaltern agency during the decolonization of Africa and the attempt of the French family to maintain its privileged position. Revising international hierarchies enable Diouana’s to envision opportunities beyond national and cultural borders. 

Restricting Diouana’s movements by withholding pay makes clear that the guise of familial inclusion actually solidifies her lower station. Living in Dakar emboldens the French family’s sense of privilege and a return home symbolizes retracting French colonial power. Madam and Monsieur perpetuate colonial thinking as the geopolitical world outside the home begins to modernize the colonial system and reinvent international relationships to meet demands of the Cold War era. Vlad Dima identifies what Paul Gilroy defines as a “postcolonial melancholia” motivating Diouana’s resistance to servitude in the home.²⁰ Scenes of Madam picking up Diouana’s shoes and clothes frame the interpersonal negotiations refracting feelings about social mobility in this age of internationalism. The great promise of postcolonial independence falls flat for poor working-class women. Sembène draws Madam with the greatest hostility toward Diouana illustrating her fear of decolonization as a new iteration of internationalism. The French family no longer lives as comfortably within their nation of origin, a move more so effecting Madam’s social position in the domestic sphere. Diouana initially relished the opportunity to be a nanny as it more closely resembles Madam’s relation to the children unlike a housekeeper or cook whose labor role limits social mobility. The thought of travel abroad and the prospect of working as a caretaker elevate Diouana’s sense of belonging through a feeling of acceptance among European women, a perception her boyfriend sought to correct. However, Madam stands to lose more in the bargain in this seemingly hetero-normative French family and feels Diouana betrays a feminine kinship by refusing to work. 

Sembène’s images of Monsieur at home obfuscate the way power operates in the French family by creating a sensation of cinematic remoteness attached to the male position. Monsieur’s frequent naps and leisure reading dress up the apartment milieu drawing an abstract male malaise as French mobility constricts: thus, Monsieur suffers from a kind of melancholia of his own. Sembène frames Madam keeping Diouana performing work that might otherwise be relegated to French women without guest worker labor on hand. Monsieur’s disaffection appears unrelated to changes in labor roles yet his confinement in the home signals reduced status. He too is shuttered indoors. Monsieur struggles to retain power through his limited presence and onscreen dialogue. The father-husband figure’s empowered position appears inaccessible, hidden in the back bedroom, withdrawn in the daily newspaper, and thereby seeming aloof to the happenings in the home. Monsieur’s mood suggests “that the colonizers have yet to face and accept the fall of the empire following the rise to independence of the African countries in the 1950s and 1960s.”²¹ Monsieur’s absences articulate how internationalism also deposes in the reorganization of world power. Yet Monsieur’s removal from many scenes or positioning on the periphery of the film frame connotes an unreachable, spectral power lurking behind the walls or in the corner of the apartment rooms. Madam’s upfront and centered framing polices the whereabouts and activities of Diouana to report how Madam suffers greater reductions in status as a woman. In turn, Monsieur appears completely disengaged from domestic spaces creating a feeling of estrangement from his family. 

The spatial and emotive distances Sembène constructs reveal Monsieur’s power in the letter scene. The film describes the way the white European male position negotiates communication between Senegalese family members. His role as interpreter, writer, and interloper between Diouana and her mother transcends gender, intersects national and cultural borders, and surveils exchanges within the African family. The scene begins with a three-shot of Monsieur and Diouana seated at the table in the foreground with a Madam silently seated in a chair in the background. Reading the letter from home signifies the importance of language in structuring power for formerly colonized classes. Diouana is emblematic of postcolonial subjectivity grappling with cultural displacement and ambivalent feelings of belonging by voicing thought off screen in the language of the colonizer. One of the few moments Diouana speaks on camera occurs in response to Monsieur asking her if he should read the letter from home as a gesture of his generosity; his tolerances for inclusion and forthrightness define his power. Sembène writes moments in the film where Monsieur and Diouana appear to fully share the cinematic frame in voice and image but only permits Diouana to sputter “Oui” to Monsieur’s question asking if he can read the letter. Needing Monsieur’s kindness to read a letter from her mother deepens Diouana’s disillusionment and strengthens the feeling of displacement at abroad and at home. 

Sembène directs a sequence of shots framing the letter reading from the establishing three-shot of the dinner table to two-shots of Monsieur and Madam, and close-ups of Diouana. The dialogue sequence during which Diouana only replies “yes” segments the cinematic milieu through the shot/reverse-shot technique commonly assigned to verbal exchanges in cinema. Sembène mostly frames Monsieur and Madam’s point of view as he reads the letter occasionally offering an anonymous perspective, ostensibly the spectator’s. Close-ups stifle and capture Diouana. Deleuzian “affection images” of Diouana’s face disrupts the exchange as he completes the reading by signing off, “Your Mother.” An instance of the affection-image, from Deleuzian cinematic theory, interrupts the movements of Monsieur and Madam at the table by inserting close-ups of Diouana’s face. Gilles Deleuze posits the close-up suggests “death, immobility, blackness.”²² Sembène abstracts Diouana from the cinematic milieu through editing and close-ups to point out her displaced social position in the French family’s home. Intercutting close-ups creates tightening strictures around Diouana reducing the promise of social mobility of decolonization by cutting her out of the cinematic terrain. Close framing extracts Diouana from any place of belonging and forecloses the international opportunism she once expressed. 

Cinematic editing and camera movements report the way African diaspora affects familial relations through Diouana’s displacement in France and strained attachments to her mother and village. The camera simulates Diouana’s movement by panning down to the table paralleling her slumping defeated posture. The letter from Dakar suggests her mother believes Diouana is too caught up in selfish pursuits. Images of the lavishness of French living that Diouana harbored before her departure circulate in Monsieur’s words which stand in for Diouana’s mother’s thoughts. The desperation coming from her mother asking Diouana to send money home amplifies the feeling of dislocation in Antibes and Dakar. Monsieur brokers this exchange. Diouana does not belong in Dakar or Antibes, but appears set adrift or caught between revising hierarchies at home and abroad. The letter scene sequences mobile and immobile sections of film drawing Monsieur and Madam’s mobility juxtaposed against Diouana’s stasis. Agency within the film frame occurs through actor abilities to affect objects within the set while Diouana appears severed from cinematic spaces and ineffective to her mother’s cries for help. 

The letter reading scene illustrates disembodied thought from action, severed image from voice, creating feelings of displacement, yet the French language is the prism through which Senegalese family members communicate. Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongo’o describes the way colonialism operates by depriving “interlanguage” communication through which Africans could “speak to one another.”²³ Ngũgĩ adds, “the colonial dominance of English and French in Africa has made African languages so suspicious of one another that there is hardly any inter-African communication.”²⁴ Viewers should observe the way Diouana’s mother is distrustful of her daughter’s cultural attachments. The barriers to African freedom at first lay in liberating African thinking from colonial systems and dismantling postcolonial consciousness still supporting European narratives of subordination. Part of Sembène’s cinematic griot-style indicts this “new imperialism” happening within “native classes […] whose positions and aspirations as a group were not in any fundamental conflict with the money-juggling classes, the financial gnomes of the real centres of power like Zurich, the City of London and Wall Street.”²⁵ In some ways Diouana’s service and preference for France illustrates how members of Senegalese communities harbor attitudes assigning power to French culture. Undoubtedly, Monsieur is emblematic of removed powerbrokers situated in European metropoles ruminating about the colonized world from the comforts of his easy chair. Diouana’s despair so pronounced in the letter scene describes a coercive rearrangement of desire to improve her prospects while in complete service to Monsieur and Madam. Diouana believes France poses better opportunities to elevate her social position and upraise the conditions of her family in Dakar when it actually provides Madam and Monsieur an elite status as they grapple with reduced mobility during decolonization. The brokered conversation between Senegalese family members in the language of the colonizer illuminates ongoing fissures within African communities after the official removal of French power. 

Sembène’s cinematic griot-style detaches postcolonial subjectivity from the temporal and spatial coordinates of Diouana’s experiences enabling thought to report and contest familial discourses as social strictures preventing liberation. The voice-over technique speaks outside the cinematic milieu and reorients spectators to experience Diouana’s personal liberation struggles even as the film frame restricts her movements within the family’s Antibes home. Black Girl dramatizes what theorists Franz Fanon and Cabral posit as “tools for mental decolonization.”²⁶ Fanon argues the “colonist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought.”²⁷ Black Girl expresses Diouana’s thoughts as a way to legitimize her subject-hood proffered by the promise of Senegalese independence, a sentiment partly reinforced by the French family. Monsieur and Madam encourage Diouana to speak as a gesture of liberal tolerances for groups restricted by the French colonial system giving way to independence movements happening worldwide. Means of individual expression bear Western notions of freedom even as exercising equality proves to be impossible for Diouana as a temporary resident of the French family. Diouana’s displacement and feeling of belonging nowhere in the shifting international landscape parallels the linguistic dominance that Sembène dramatizes through a kind of cinematic aphasia that ironically voices resistance directly to spectators.

Speaking off-screen confronts objects within the film frame and excludes Diouana from the kind of agency she envisioned working and living in France makes possible. The depths of despair and lack of social mobility circulating in thought throughout Black Girl leads to Diouana’s suicide. Sembène follows the brutal images of Diouana’s death with a montage of families enjoying the French Riviera. The beach sequence deploys a long pan shot, a two-shot of women sunbathing, a two-shot of children playing along the shore, and concludes with a zoom shot of a man reading the newspaper heading announcing Diouana’s death by slashing her throat; these signs of European families taking advantage of summer leisure in the Riviera violently collide with the image of Diouana’s body in a pool of blood in Monsieur and Madam’s bathtub. Sembène cuts to a medium shot of Madam and then to a two-shot of Madam and Monsieur. The cut from the exterior beach scene to the interior apartment conflates the beachgoers with Madam and Monsieur’s privileged status. Sembène’s parallel cutting draws Monsieur taking notice of the same newspaper headline and then exclaiming, “We’re going back to Dakar!” Sembène dissolves to and from a black frame again capturing Monsieur crossing the footbridge heading to Diouana’s village with her suitcase and mask in hand. These sequences highlight Monsieur’s privileged mobility as he returns to Dakar symbolically atoning for retrenching strictures of disenfranchisement in Antibes. The French patriarchal figure crosses continents, intersects cultures, and returns to the former French colony; Monsieur’s impulsive movements abroad signal ways in which Africa sustains in the enabled white European imaginary even as formal strictures of colonization appear to wane. Monsieur can return to Africa, Diouana cannot.

Black Girl concentrates on Diouana’s self-imposed exile challenging the thoughts and images imbricating elite and disenfranchised, established and migrant classes, and global subaltern group separated from familial networks in search of opportunities seemingly not possible in local communities. The distance between Diouana and her family located in Dakar synecdochally links Europe’s deep history of colonization to contemporary diasporic subject positions: the institutions of slavery, the development of the Middle Passage, and the various apartheid systems in African colonies emerging after legally abolishing the slave system, to the imperial extensions retrenching Euro-American control through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, institutions of global capital flows and stoppages. Ousmane Sembène implicates the family at the epicenter of cultural hegemony through which discourses of world power and knowledge about communities beyond borders produces and negotiates new geopolitical landscapes. 

Though a groundbreaking film in the emergence of Third Cinema, Black Girl highlights aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” illuminating the rhizomatic world we live in now.²⁸ The uprooted and heterogeneous world today finds and creates curious overlaps between privileged and marginalized groups straining to make attachments as national, ethnic, and cultural communities appear more mobile than ever. Viewers today screen Sembène’s first feature-length African film as part of the contemporary global “mediascape” inflecting the current imagination.²⁹ Ousmane Sembène’s films and novels are now part of the ways in which global communities encounter, think, and experience each other through networked technologies collapsing distance and intensifying the feeling of propinquity. Black Girl contributes to the “complex repertoires of images, narratives, ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.”³⁰ Global media culture includes the dissemination of diasporic images disrupting the “internal coherence” of Euro-American master narratives of freedom, liberty, and democracy promised by the digital economy. 

The emerging global era today reinvents metropole-satellite relations as industrial spaces de-territorialize and re-territorialize enabling high technology corporations to take shape as drivers of the international scene. While upraising the condition of some groups, new forms of internationalism threaten established conceptions of citizenship and produce new fears of eroding social and geographic borders. The movements of the undocumented and refugees fleeing political, economic, and environmental catastrophes. New waves of immigrants and guest workers energize the “information age” boon to make way for software engineers, digital experience designers, and infrastructure workers whose H1-B visas reinvent the world economic system. Movements of people today create newer forms of cross-class, intercultural, interethnic, and interracial encounters, and the promises of opportunity are resonant with Diouana’s hopefulness despite her indentured servitude in Black Girl. David Harvey explains globalization as “restoration and reconstitution of class power worldwide.”³¹ Harvey rethinks the global economy as “uneven development” garnering power in the hands of a few.³²

The backdrop of African decolonization in Black Girl serves as a precursor for the heterogeneous diasporas of the global, postmodern age. Comparative studies scholar Neil Lazarus identifies a “rupture of epochal proportions” to distinguish more recent forms of internationalism from previous periods in history.³³ The end of Communism and socialism as the universal counterpoint to capitalism is now two decades removed leaving a vast chasm in how populations conceptualize citizenship. In seeming anticipation of the sways of anxiety and opportunity in the emergent global economy, Fredric Jameson’s hugely influential book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, identifies the way cinematic production reports “the displacement of time, the spatialization of the temporal (and) often registers its novelties by way of a sense of loss.”³⁴ Cinema enables the display of thoughts through images interrupting descriptions of environments with ideas circulating in the imagination. Over fifty years ago, Black Girl spatialized thought to reveal uncertain feelings and thinking about citizenship and belonging worldwide. 

Images of Diouana in the French family’s home in Antibes illustrates revising global power and reinstanting class relations in the domestic sphere. The African and French family’s lessening sense of privilege are not the only emotional impetus for the spatialization of feeling. Cinematic thought evinces melancholic feelings longing to preserve hierarchies by reconstructing and embedding disadvantaged groups within shifting global class structures. Global media culture describes perspectives of citizenship between nationals and transnationals alike. Movies refract seemingly infinite inclusions and occlusions inspiring the multitude to continuously imagine possibilites elsewhere while established communities continuously invent fear of newly mobile groups crossing borders everywhere. Black Girl describes how these anxieties about the world at large circulate in African and European familial conversations. 

Jayson Baker

1. Christopher L. Miller, “Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 198), 281-300. ↩︎
2. Fassil Demissie, “A Tribute to Ousmane Sembene,” African Identities 5, no. 3 (2007): 307-11. ↩︎
3. Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” in Theorizing National Cinemas, ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 2006), 44-60. ↩︎
4. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London: British Film Institute Press, 1994). ↩︎
5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006). ↩︎
6. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1962). ↩︎
7. Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak, “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 330-48. ↩︎
8. Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapons of Theory,” Tricontinental Conference of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Havana, Cuba, 1966. ↩︎
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). ↩︎
10. Akin Adesokin, “The Significance of Ousmane Sembene,” World Literature Today (2008): 37-39. ↩︎
11. Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Keller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 366-80.  ↩︎
12. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). ↩︎
13. Rachael Langford, “Black and White in Black and White: Identity and Cinematography in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire De…/Black Girl (1966),” Studies in French Cinema 1, no. 1 (2001): 13-21. ↩︎
14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1967). ↩︎
15. Lieve Spass, “Female Domestic Labor and Third World Politics in La Noire De…,” Jump Cut 27 (1982): 26-27. ↩︎
16. Ibid. ↩︎
17. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Warrior Masks: Global Womanism’s Neo-Colonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context,” in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 256-78. ↩︎
18. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Prayer to Masks,” in One World of Literature, ed. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Norman A. Spencer (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 1992), 145-46. ↩︎
19. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, revised ed., ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Keller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 366-80. ↩︎
20. Vlad Dima, “Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de…: Melancholia in Photo, Text, and Film,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2014): 56-68. ↩︎
21. Ibid. ↩︎
22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). ↩︎
23. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (Oxford: James Carrey, 1993). ↩︎
24. Ibid.  ↩︎
25. Ibid. ↩︎
26. Melissa Thackway, “Future Past: Integrating Orality into Francophone West African Film,” in Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema: An Anthology, ed. Julie F. Codell(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 458-70. ↩︎
27. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004). ↩︎
28. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). ↩︎
29. Ibid. ↩︎
30. Ibid. ↩︎
31. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). ↩︎
32. Ibid. ↩︎
33. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ↩︎
34. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). ↩︎