“Europe is Not My Center. Europe is on the Outskirts”: The Battle between Languages-of-Power and Native Languages in Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ousmane Sembène’s Emitai
Abstract
In Camera d’Afrique (1983), Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, considered the “godfather of African cinema” exclaims that: “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts. After 100 years here, did they speak my language?” after being asked if his films were understood in Europe (Boughedir). Sembène’s frustrations demonstrate the key issue of language which he and other filmmakers from post-colonial countries faced when seeking to make films that spoke for and too their regional audiences. As a filmmaker from a country that was a French colony for over three hundred years, Sembène’s films were shaped by the scars of French linguistic lashings, which imposed French, the national language of the French empire, as Senegal’s administrative language and the default tongue of its cinema. In Emitai (1971), Sembène’s third feature-length film, the tensions between native African languages and French were made explicit. The narrative of the film revolves around a group of French military officers, along with their French-speaking Senegalese comrades, who seek to dominate a rural Ajamat village (a West African ethnic group) by taking the rice they use for religious ceremonies and giving it to the French army during WWII. Benedict Anderson’s concepts of “print capitalism” as well as “the fatality of language,” from his book Imagined Communities (1983) help explain the risk that languages-of-power pose to indigenous tongues and the artificial leveraging of said languages to control African countries through neo-colonialism. By using Anderson’s work to analyze the use of printed French text as propaganda in Emitai, I will demonstrate how colonial powers use languages-of-power to indoctrinate their subjects, as well as how Sembène weaponizes French and Ajamat to undermine colonial control by breaking away from the capitalistic demands of languages-of-power which often control the marketability and production of African stories.
Start Time
16-4-2025 9:00 AM
End Time
16-4-2025 11:30 AM
Presentation Type
Poster
Presentation Category
Art and Humanities
Student Type
Graduate Student - Masters
Faculty Mentor
Matthew Holtmeier
Faculty Department
Literature and Language
“Europe is Not My Center. Europe is on the Outskirts”: The Battle between Languages-of-Power and Native Languages in Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ousmane Sembène’s Emitai
In Camera d’Afrique (1983), Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, considered the “godfather of African cinema” exclaims that: “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts. After 100 years here, did they speak my language?” after being asked if his films were understood in Europe (Boughedir). Sembène’s frustrations demonstrate the key issue of language which he and other filmmakers from post-colonial countries faced when seeking to make films that spoke for and too their regional audiences. As a filmmaker from a country that was a French colony for over three hundred years, Sembène’s films were shaped by the scars of French linguistic lashings, which imposed French, the national language of the French empire, as Senegal’s administrative language and the default tongue of its cinema. In Emitai (1971), Sembène’s third feature-length film, the tensions between native African languages and French were made explicit. The narrative of the film revolves around a group of French military officers, along with their French-speaking Senegalese comrades, who seek to dominate a rural Ajamat village (a West African ethnic group) by taking the rice they use for religious ceremonies and giving it to the French army during WWII. Benedict Anderson’s concepts of “print capitalism” as well as “the fatality of language,” from his book Imagined Communities (1983) help explain the risk that languages-of-power pose to indigenous tongues and the artificial leveraging of said languages to control African countries through neo-colonialism. By using Anderson’s work to analyze the use of printed French text as propaganda in Emitai, I will demonstrate how colonial powers use languages-of-power to indoctrinate their subjects, as well as how Sembène weaponizes French and Ajamat to undermine colonial control by breaking away from the capitalistic demands of languages-of-power which often control the marketability and production of African stories.