Colonialism In Ousmane Sembene's La Noire De

The film La Noire De is Ousmane Sembene’s first feature film that centers on a black protagonist in search of a better life elsewhere than her hometown. The film generates the blackness of the subject, matter, space, and experience. Thus, the film becomes a cinematic channel to portray the racial and colour differences and subjectivity, and how it permeates into the fabric of its audience’ visual perception. Sembene employs strong images in the film to provide an unambiguous portrayal of the blackness of the body. This sense of displacement results in the cultural product of the film that invokes audience to identify the contrast as a problem within the visual field, thus, elucidating the need to identify the presence of blackness within a community that establishes hierarchical values through colour. Immanuel Kant’s theory that judgments are made visually by observation which is then analyzed and reflected to produce critiques. It is solely aesthetical, as this film has portrayed itself to be. Though Sembene’s La Noire De is premiered as an elegiac film that portrays domestic colonialism, Diouana’s and Madame’s attitude towards freedom and beauty, which is intrinsically linked to notions of racialization, are essentially ambiguous at best, thus revealing instead the notions of oppression that Diouana, and consequently the African majority feels during the time of political appropriation from the French Colony.
Using aesthetic expectations, Sembene provides a realist sense