Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the Black body as “the living crypt of capital”, as various systems (colonial, capitalist, etc.) empty Black people of their life force while barely keeping them alive to continue feeding the capitalist machine.1 Capitalism has long been a tool of control, doubly taking advantage of Black people on whose literal backs America was built. As Mark Fisher quotes Alain Badiou, capitalism is “unjust” and “we live in a contradiction,” because capitalism is presented as a net positive in comparison with more negative realities.2 We have been so thoroughly bombarded with the “values” of capitalism that we cannot imagine an alternative—a reality enforced by the fact that more positive futures never materialize. This tragedy is Fisher’s capitalist realism, and it presents itself, in essence, as anti-utopian. While African cinemas (mostly Senegalese) initially focused on the stark realities of the ongoing effects of colonization, the current trend is one of more hopeful projections. These contemporary narratives foreground human emotions such as love and renewed beliefs in better futures. In other words, the current iteration of African cinematic production seemingly runs counter to Fisher’s capitalist realism.
The lack of attention paid to positive emotions in the early days of Senegalese cinema, roughly spanning from Paulin Vieyra’s Afrique-sur-Seine (1956) to Ousmane Sembene’s Xala (1974), can be explained by noting that Africa’s pioneer directors favored politically engaged topics (i.e., cinéma-engagé). Emotions such as love constituted unserious topics in comparison to the urgency of resistance, which primarily focused on representing historical oppression and its aftereffects, rather than more thoroughly exploring the impact of capitalism on African societies. The lack of sustained attention paid to human emotions such as love paradoxically underscores the effectiveness of colonialism in barring colonized people from access to and enjoyment of fundamental emotions. This paradox partially led to filmic productions choosing to feature representations of the inhuman (zombies, spirits, etc.). These films often foreground emotionless walking metaphors that reflect the colonial project to deny other people’s humanity. This imagery also happens to fit perfectly into Mbembe’s living crypt metaphor; the Black zombie is neither alive nor dead, which is both an outcome and a fundamental component of the capitalist machine.
While Fisher’s arguments continue to be discussed in the political-cultural zeitgeist, I would argue that they have less relevance in the Global South. To my mind, this argument applies evenly across most theories coming from the Global North because the ontological roots of Western theories have historically tended to appear, and then grow on a track that almost never intersected with the realities of the non-Western world. It stands to reason that these writers should not be used as a theoretical backbone to any analysis of cultural production from Africa. Zizek, to take but one example, brilliantly explains how the return of the dead reveals traumas that have not been appropriately dealt with, and he gives the Holocaust and the gulag as examples. These examples are large-scale tragedies, of course, but aren’t the Middle Passage and the hundreds of years of slavery that followed much more apt examples for the zombie hordes that chase collective memory in Africa? It remains the case that these authors had, and may continue to have, a blind spot when it comes to the Global South.
One of the ongoing arguments about Africa in the humanities relates to the split between modernity and postmodernity: Can the continent, which was denied modernity during colonialism, even be discussed in terms of the postmodern? In Western theory, the postmodern is a precursor for meaningful conversations about capitalism and late capitalism. Moreover, when we add the concept of neoliberalism to the postmodern, we arrive at Fisher’s capitalist realism. So, the more appropriate question remains: Why try to understand Africa and Africans by way of quintessentially Global North ideas? The inferred answer is that one should lean more forcefully into the thought of indigenous intellectuals. If white writers live in the Global North, as I do, they can certainly still contribute to the discourse about African cultures in productive ways, but the starting point should always be African voices.
One example of a politically engaged Senegalese director is famed filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, a staunch critic of capitalism who was often photographed wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.3 Che’s image also appears as a poster on the set of Xala (1974) but did not make the final cut, as Sembene opted instead for images of Chaplin and anti-colonial leaders, such as Samori Touré and Amilcar Cabral. Moreover, the character played by Sembene in Mandabi (1968)—a notary—has a large photo of young Guevara covering his desk. As David Murphy and Patrick Williams note, “Sembene’s Marxism must also be seen within the context of his profound pan-Africanism, a belief in the unity of purpose and destiny of the different peoples of his continent.”4 Those beliefs materialize in the political allegory Xala. Here, Rama is the daughter of the main character, the corrupt and inept El-Hadji. Unlike her neocolonial father, Rama wears African traditional clothing, attends Cheick Anta Diop University in Dakar, professes her boycott of French-imported items, and meaningfully sits in front of a pan-African map. Nevertheless, the version of the future promised by a character like Rama remains unfulfilled.
Decades later, Ada, the main character in Mati Diop’s zombie love story Atlantics (2019), also looks forward to a more hopeful future. In the last shot of the film, she faces the camera and declares to be “Ada of the future.” Yet that promise is undercut by the first shot, which juxtaposes a CGI futuristic tower to the right of the frame with the ongoing construction of another tower to the left. The contrast is striking, and it is also a spectral image: the computer-generated tower is like a ghost of the “real” tower on the left. However, unlike a ghost, which usually finds its meaning in the past, this shot points to unattainable future potentialities. The “after” is just a fantasy, a computer-generated projection, while the reality is still under construction. This shot tragically captures how little change or progress has occurred regarding postcolonial subjectivity since the 1960s. In other words, this shot represents the ruinous, seemingly inescapable status quo of the postcolonial world that has morphed into an uneven neoliberal global order. Like Rama before her, there is very little reason to believe that Ada will live in a better future.
Yet, as Atlantics unfolds, Diop suggests that one could lean into love as a potential solution to the capitalist commodification of emotions. Unlike the first-generation films, Atlantics follows a veritable love story. Young construction worker Souleiman and his friends decide to take their chances out on the sea and make it to Spain; they never return, at least not to their original bodies. Ada, Souleiman’s girlfriend, is promised by her parents to Omar, a rich émigré whom she does not love. The night of the wedding, a mysterious fire is set in the matrimonial bedroom, and detective Issa is charged with the case. In the meantime, the dead come back and inhabit either the body of a loved one or, in the case of Souleiman, that of Issa. The workers, as their female companions, haunt Ndiaye, the wealthy man who wants to build the (CGI) five-star hotel and is asking for their unpaid salaries. Ada leaves Omar and connects with Souleiman-as-Issa, who, like her, never cares about the money. While Fisher refers to the current conditions as “constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything except pursue pleasure” (i.e., in terms of consumption)5, Diop’s film foregrounds an emotional pleasure that resists commodification. Ada and Soulemain’s love is not to be gained, as it is already ongoing when we meet them, and it cannot be traded. Thus we witness Ada reject Omar. Most importantly, though, this love cannot be lost, as the main characters resist the spell of capitalism: Ada refuses the iPhone gifted to her by Omar, and Souleiman chases love instead of the money owed to him by Ndiaye. Their love cannot be lost, even when one of them dies, as they still make love connecting the world of the dead with that of the living. Both characters look inward, which opposes the external ethos of capitalism (i.e., alienating and external to oneself). In doing so, they allow us to imagine an alternate state of being and of subjectivity, one that runs counter to the inescapability of capitalism. Furthermore, this state of being is something akin to interpersonal fulfillment, however nebulous and uncertain, which also opposes the well-defined rules and traits of capitalism. In short, Diop’s Atlantics puts forth a representation of an anti-capitalist utopic state of being.
Similar utopic vibes echo in the writings of Mbembe and Felwine Sarr. Mbembe places Africa at the intellectual center of the world, intimating that the best is yet to come for the continent.6 Sarr, too, imagines a positive future, calling for a rethinking of Africa’s economy through a recalibration of its relationship with cultural production.7 Sarr’s pathway forward requires a “reinvented relationship with its traditions and its cultural resources”8, which suggests breaking away from capitalism and leaning more vigorously into humanism. Diop puts these positive ideas on cinematic display, and she is hardly alone. Recent films such as Ramata Toulaye-Sy’s Banel & Adama (2023) and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Black Tea (2024)—both love stories—underscore the focal shift from the doctrine of cinéma-engagé to more emotion-driven narratives.9 But will this trend turn into a kind of emotional Kitsch10 that ignores the complexity of the human? The risk of leaning into idealization is that we might fall into illusions and political escapism yet again. The only solution is to believe, a key word for Fisher, too, thalove will help us imagine a perfect place where capitalism fails to corrupt the heart. Representing this love in filmic art might be the starting point that allows us to re-imagine the possibility of, and then the actualization of, better futures. If we do get there, African film would have played a crucial part.
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Endnotes
- Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 5.
- Ironically, this is a classic example of anti-capitalist sentiment ironically feeding the capitalist machine.
- David Murphy & Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors, ( Manchester University Press, 2007), 55.
- Fisher, 22.
- Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit, (Découverte, 2013), 75-88.
- Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia, (Philippe Rey, 2016), 10, 13-14.
- Felwine Sarr, “Reopening Futures,” in The Politics of Time, ed. by Mbembe & Sarr, (Polity, 2013, 117-128), 120.
- In a longer article, a fuller historicization of Senegalese cinema would better contextualize this shift. It might suffice to say that Senegalese productions tended to fall under oblique genres and that francophone African cinemas, in general, were defined by the impossibility of classification (this is not the case for Nollywood). Nowadays, though, contemporary productions seem to align and overlap in more significant ways with global trends and the perceived preferences of film festivals and award gatekeepers.
- In this phrase, I am repurposing Milan Kundera’s idea of political Kitsch.
Vlad Dima
