Abstract
The prose fiction of Ousmane Sembene is very easy to comprehend on the surface but it is, in fact, profoundly complex. There is a remarkable consistency in his work: a preoccupation with the struggles of the working poor and the unemployed; and also with the exploitation and oppression of a relentless capitalism that seriously threatens the social and cultural structures ofsociety as well as the inner recesses of the mind. There is also a consistent aesthetic context in his work, in which African artistic principles underlie and undermine the limitations of French forms of expression, since these forms do not always provide the author with the semantic, linguistic, and symbolic tools he needs.
Recommended Citation
Case, Frederick Ivor
(1993)
"Aesthetics, Ideology, and Social Commitment in the Prose Fiction of Ousmane Sembene,"
Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 11, Article 2.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/2