ABSTRACT
Senegalese author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s first cinematic work, the 1963 short film Borom Sarret, can be considered a Soviet-style “ode to the machine” transposed to a (post)colonial setting. In this setting, “tractor art” becomes a site of contest both of Soviet models of progress and of imperialist /consumer-capitalist modes of exploitation. This chapter analyzes Borom Sarret in relation to Soviet cinematic classics, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1930 Earth and Ivan Pyriev’s 1939 Tractor Drivers, comparing the films’ construction of the machine as agent for social change in order to identify the Cold War significance of Sembène’s (post)colonial cultural production.
