LONDON (March 19, 2014 ) -- The films of the late Senegalese filmmaker Semb�ne Ousmane shows how women can fight back against negative images, according to Ekua Andrea Agha, a Museum Africa board member and PhD candidate in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College.
In a paper presented at Africa Research Day at University College, London (UCL), Agha asserted that Semb�ne's films created new images of women in African cinema. The paper, titled Breaking the mould: How Semb�ne Ousmane (re) creates new images for women in African Cinema, focused on the negative representations of women and their day-to-day realities. Agha argued that these realities are prevalent in male-dominated societies in general and African societies in particular, and that they "can be challenged" using some themes from Ousmane's seminal film Xala'. This critically acclaimed film is a satirical criticism of the elite class that inherited power from French colonial masters after Senegal gained independence from France in 1960. However, this group reneged on its promise to deliver the people from the shackles of colonial domination and continued to use the existing socioeconomic structures to oppress the subaltern class, comprised mostly of the working class and women, devalued and treated by the elites as the 'other'. In addition, the film illustrated how the new capitalist structure led to the creation of class divisions in post-colonial Africa, allowing the dominant class to treat women as commodities that can be oppressed, undermined, devalued and disposed of.
Agha's presentation explored how Semb�ne's knowledge of African cultural traditions was used as a counter hegemonic tool to (re)create revolutionary images of female characters in his films, exemplified by the protagonist El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye's progressive daughter, Rama, who is not afraid to confront her father about his decision to take another wife old enough to be his daughter. The film also underscored Semb�ne's belief that women must be included in Africa's socioeconomic and political development if progress is to be made on the continent.
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