Decolonizing the Mind and the Gaze: “Xala” and the Impotence of the Postcolonial State

Abstract

Between the 1960s and 1970s, alongside anti-colonial struggles in Africa, the possibility of building an African identity and cultural and political autonomy for the continent emerged through cinema. The cinematographic language was configured, at that moment, in a speech tool in the face of the difficulty of writing History. The camera thus became a weapon for denouncing the impotence of the African political class and, in addition, a means for claiming a decolonized image of the continent. In this article, I problematize the concepts of identity, tradition, and modernity in the post-African independence context, according to the representation of the film Xala (1975) by the Senegalese filmmaker-writer Ousmane Sembène. Furthermore, I discuss the aspects that enabled the construction of an imaginary of overcoming colonization and the discursive articulation of this cinematographic tendency around the desired social revolution in Africa.