Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa

Van Dam, Julie C.

doi:10.3828/jlcds.2016.17

Ousmane Sembène’s Early Resistant Bodies in Xala

Van Dam, Julie C.

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2016), 10, (2), 207–221.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2016.17
Language: English
Pages: 15

Abstract

Postcolonial Francophone sub-African literature and film is inhabited by a legion of physically disabled characters, yet most critics see them as mere signifiers of the failure or tragedy of the postcolonial state. While disability studies has been slowly “cripping” the global and the postcolonial, postcolonial studies has, for the most part, turned a cold shoulder to its crips within. Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s 1975 film, Xala, calls for both a clinical unseeing of disability and a “coming out all over” of disability in Postcolonial Francophone Studies to recalibrate our focus toward those bodies that dwell in the frame but somehow end up not really mattering. Through the attentive study of varying valences and materialities of visibility, the article argues that Sembène’s film offers an early theorization of disability as a powerful visual counter-narrative to dominant discourses of the postcolonial nation and its hygiaesthetic body politic. Expanding on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of ethical staring as well as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “disability as multitude,” the article teases out the ways in which this film forces the viewer not only to stare at disabled bodies, but also to behold them and even anticipate their coming.

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