Art, Memory, and Recollection in Ousmane Sembene’s Historiographic Film Emitaï (1971)

Resumen

This article examines the interplay of art, memory, and colonial propaganda in Ousmane Sembene’s Emitaï (1971), a seminal anticolonial and historiographic film. Through a close reading of the film and previously underexplored archival materials, the article explores how Sembene reconfigures oral traditions, ritual, and folklore as narrative tools to critique colonial domination and its afterlives in the postcolonial period. Drawing on interdisciplinary postcolonial theory, it revisits Emitaï with three key objectives: (1) to investigate the function of art and collective memory in contesting colonial propaganda and historiography; (2) to analyse Sembene’s ideological and artistic stance on myth and ancestral authority; and (3) to examine his gendered approach to national history and cultural resistance. The article argues that Emitaï stages a critical encounter between memory (mémoire), recollection (rappel) (Ricoeur) and historiographic cinema (Burgoyne), foregrounding how collective memory is mediated through narrative, imagination, and performance. In doing so, Sembene offers a radical rethinking of African cultural production as a space where historical trauma, spiritual belief, and artistic imagination converge to challenge ancestral, colonial and postcolonial power systems.