Abstract

Senegalese author and filmmaker Sembene Ousmane is justly touted as a radical feminist attuned to the power of women in colonial Africa in his fiction and his films. Critics correctly hail his 1960 novel, God’s Bits of Wood, as the place he embodies this radical feminism most decidedly. However, none of these analyses accounts for the very real limits to their liberation that the women in the novel face—both from colonial ideologies and traditional Oulof family structures. In this paper, reading Sembene alongside the socialist feminisms of Friedrich Engels, Maria Mies, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and paying particular attention to the issue of colonialism in each of these works, I demonstrate that Sembene is a theorist not just of women’s potential for liberation, but also of the very real limits they face in their struggles for liberation.

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