ABSTRACT
American academics fi nd popular culture an easy target of critique in their attempt to raise the consciousness of students manipulated by the pervasive misogyny in song lyrics or unrealistic visual representations of women’s bodies. Such a U.S.-specifi c critical perspective must be reconsidered in the analysis of media originating from West Africa. From Nigerian soap operas to Cameroonian comics to Senegalese art house cinema, media in both English-and French-speaking countries can educate about HIV, sexual harassment, immigration obstacles, human rights violations, and violence against women. In fact, mass media, far from numbing the populace with anti-intellectual escapism, can be especially liberating for women, as represented both within the fi ctional text of Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé (2004) and by the form of the text itself as a feature fi lm.
