Xala cover
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Pre-order. Available 02 May 2024
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Description

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite.

James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory.

Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Dakar, 1974
1. From Novel to Image
2. Africanity ? Africa
3. A Curse is Still a Curse
4. The Postcolonial City as Third Space
5. Evian or Spit
6. The Future is Female
Epilogue: The Legacy of Xala
Notes
Credits
Filmography

Product details

Published 02 May 2024
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 112
ISBN 9781839025983
Imprint British Film Institute
Illustrations 60 colour illus
Dimensions 190 x 135 mm
Series BFI Film Classics
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

James S. Williams

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Li…

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