Cassava Westerns: Ways of Watching Abderrahmane Sissako

This essay takes Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s statements about the impression Spaghetti Westerns made on him as a teen as an entry point to consider new insights into Sissako’s films that emerge when they are viewed comparatively through the genre convention of the western. Rather than arguing that Sissako seeks to fulfill or depart from such conventions, the essay shows that Sissako’s experience of the genre is in fact common to a number of West African artists and that his approach to landscape, quest narratives, and seriality resonate with the Spaghetti Western genre. Yet the influence of key francophone thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon is equally strong in Sissako’s work. The political engagement that motivated many Italian directors is transmuted in Sissako’s work to address the slow violence of globalization, using familiar generic tropes to anchor viewers confronted with cross-genre, self-reflexive, and open-ended films.