Ousmane Sembene's Hall of Men: (En)Gendering Everyday Heroism

Abstract

Faat Kiné (2000) and Moolaade (2004) have together generated remarkable critical attention with regard to the place of women in Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s filmography. While numerous film critics and theorists see Sembene as a veritable torchbearer for African feminism, they have not sufficiently attended to the role men play in these final films. In order to contribute a more comprehensive feminist interpretation of these films, in this article I expose the complex web of power relations in which women’s issues are embedded and show how the patriarchal grip risks thwarting plural expressions of both femininity and masculinity. I further demonstrate how female characters and their issues in Faat Kiné and Moolaade enable Sembene to unveil male characters that lay claim to novel paradigms of masculinities, no longer shackled to the colonial narrative of the past but rather anchored in the practice of their material experience of the everyday.

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