Cold War Creolization: Ousmane Sembène's Le Dernier de l'empire

Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembène's oeuvre according to the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, this article examines his 1981 novel, Le Dernier de l'empire [The Last of the Empire], through an expanded optic: the global Cold War. The trope's complexity manifests in, for example, references to the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Vietnam War, as well as to political instability on the African continent. Sembène demonstrates how the Cold War was not simply an American and Soviet affair through repeated use of the catalogue as literary device. In so doing, the novel interpolates Third Worldism into the Senegalese context. Aesthetically, Sembène blends griot storytelling techniques, flashback (analepsis), and Soviet montage to critique neocolonialism in the postcolony. The narrative depicts the threat of military coup to the succession of power according to how postcolonial actors interpret the Cold War's intellectual and geographic multipolarity. In sum, the novel creolizes the Cold War in both content and form.