Intertextuality, Plagiarism, and Recycling in Ousmane Sembene's Le docker noir (Black Docker)

Colonialism and the accompanying violence of Western language literacy that was indissociable from the pedagogic mechanisms of the French imperial ambition left indelible marks on francophone literary production. The objective of this essay is provided by a consideration of Ousmane Sembene's 1956 novel, Le docker noir (Black Docker), and Richard Wright's 1940 novel, Native Son (Un enfant du pays), within a transcolonial and transnational framework that also explores connections with a range of other texts generated by African, African American, Caribbean, and European authors. This case study of Sembene's novel serves to highlight a different facet of the question of textual ownership by investigating how an African and African American critical apparatus can take the debate in a new direction by demonstrating how the mediation between Sembene and Wright needs to be more aggressively pursued in order to complicate terms such as intertextuality, plagiarism, and recycling.