ORIENTALISM, COLONIAL POWER, AND SILENCING IN OUSMANE SEMBÈNE’S BLACK GIRL (1966)

Abstract

To explore the way in which colonial discourse still influences power relations, representation, and identity in a postcolonial situation, this paper analyzes the work of Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1966) based on the theoretical background of Edward Said Orientalism. Despite the fact that the political autonomy was the formalization of the colonial rule, the movie shows that colonial subjection continues to exist in the form of daily habits, language, and cultural subordinations. It is the story of a young Senegalese woman Diouana who moves to France where she hopes to find an economic stability and social mobility, but instead becomes racialized and exploited sexually and psychologically in a French family home. This paper applies a qualitative analysis design by conducting a systematic analysis of verbatim dialogues of the original film script translated into English to facilitate analysis. The coded conversations were named into themes to determine common themes in relation to the Western superiority, colonial power, racial othering, objectification, silencing, loss of identity, and resistance in NVivo. The results show that the marginalization that Diouana undergoes is not a personal phenomenon but a structural effect of Orientalist ideology that would turn the African subject into an inferior being of the passive and having a value only through the work. The analysis also shows how language, commands, and silences are all means of domination, which strengthens colonial power even in a post-independence environment. Finally, the paper suggests that Black Girl reveals the long-term effects of the colonial system by showing how the roles of Orientalist images in the creation of social relations and subjectivity are still valid. The tragic destiny of Diouana allows Sembène to criticize the postcolonial illusion of equality and presupposes the immediate necessity to revisit Western discourses that are silent and inhuman to the formerly colonized nations.