In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 5 The Postcolonial Rebel I n the years since the birth of rebel iconography, its arc of influence has reached far and wide. Hollywood’s domination of worldwide film distribution, maintained with the assistance of the U.S. State Department , has guaranteed that its products receive the widest possible exposure. American films join American fast food, American television, and American pop music in their relentless international dispersion. Although there are good reasons to condemn American pop culture’s assault on the world, the situation is complex and rife with contradictions. For many young people internationally, pop culture from the United States, no matter how tainted by commercial interests, can be experienced as meaningful. Rather than function as passive consumers of hegemonic American culture, global youths often integrate American cultural products into their own traditions and practices to create new hybrid forms,1 and these composite texts frequently make their way back around the globe, influencing production in the cultural capitals. Considering this international exchange of commodities, scholar of African American studies and philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that “if there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other.”2 While the rebel figure’s presence internationally is on the one hand evidence of American cultural hegemony, on the other hand there are endless possibilities for appropriation . Rebel iconography can be turned back against the American interests that produced it, and, as with any ambiguous icon, its meaning is up for grabs. At the time of the rebel icon’s appearance in the fifties, colonial subjects around the world were energized by dreams of independence and the desire to create nations based on nonexploitive principles. Those dreams and desires carried them through the arduous years of wars for inde- The Postcolonial Rebel 135 pendence. When it came, independence was celebrated, but subsequent years brought disillusionment when some of the early leaders who were beacons of hope, such as Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, were assassinated by political opponents, and subsequent leaders were characterized by corruption and profiteering. Countries with great potential have been consigned to poverty by their rulers and by trade policies that favor the U.S. and Europe. Many Third World countries have been transformed into sweatshop factories for the production of the First World’s consumables , with workers earning pennies per hour and often laboring in unsafe conditions under armed guard.3 These postcolonial realities have replaced the obvious colonial enemy of the past with much more diffuse and anonymous enemies against whom resistance can feel futile. Two films that explore the postcolonial dilemmas of disillusioned adolescents are Touki-Bouki, a 1973 Senegalese film directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, and La Haine (Hate), a 1995 French film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Both films depict young people dissatisfied with their stifling environments and limited prospects. The postcolonial world they have been born into relegates them to the margins and regards them with racist distrust. They are estranged from their parents’ generation and from the opportunities that independence was supposed to bring. Their struggle is complicated by their inability to find an authentic means of expression for their dissatisfaction, since the American and European pop culture that dominates their lives has already appropriated and packaged the concept of rebellion. The western-style rebel icon is a readily available but woefully inadequate role model that cannot overcome these young people’s powerlessness in the face of entrenched institutional authority. Like their teen rebel precursors on screen, they also feel deprived, but the causes are rooted in colonial erasure of their cultures’ histories and in postcolonial perpetuation of Eurocentric ideology. Touki-Bouki and La Haine reveal the futility of mimicking the rebel icon, which offers a seductive pose but fails to produce actual change. Touki-Bouki was made by director Djibril Diop Mambety (1945–1998), who was twenty-eight years old when the film was released in 1973. Mambety grew up in the small town of Colobane near the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the son of a Muslim cleric, and studied theatre in Dakar before turning to film. He was reportedly expelled from acting school because of his rebellious lack of discipline.4 Touki-Bouki was highly acclaimed, winning the Special Jury Award at the Moscow Film Festival and the International Critics Award at Cannes. It is a stunningly powerful film about alienated Senegalese youth in which Mambety’s piercing...

Share