Cinema is our 'night school': appropriation, falsification, and dissensus in the art of Ousmane Sembène

This essay engages the political, aesthetic, and ethical significance of Ousmane Sembène's art by examining how it disturbs the truth claims that underlie African practices and conceptions of self that are streamlined into narrow colonial, ?Afro-radicalist,? and ?nativist? narratives of African identity. On the whole, the essay illustrates how the aesthetic entanglements and falsifications in Sembène's cinematic and literary practice dispose us toward a different way of thinking about Africanness, modernity in Africa, and the political.