1993/01/01 by Frederick Ivor Case, Case, Frederick Ivor
Social Sciences · #African history and culture studies #South African History and Culture
paper · doi:10.7275/6867
openalex publication_date 1993/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The prose fiction of Ousmane Sembene is very easy to comprehend on the surface but it is, in fact, profoundly complex. There is a remarkable consistency in his work: a preoccupation with the struggles of the working poor and the unemployed; and also with the exploitation and oppression of a relentless capitalism that seriously threatens the social and cultural structures ofsociety as well as the inner recesses of the mind. There is also a consistent aesthetic context in his work, in which African artistic principles underlie and undermine the limitations of French forms of expression, since these forms do not always provide the author with the semantic, linguistic, and symbolic tools he needs.