ABSTRACT
Historiography can thus become a primary concern, for the very concept of a nation presupposes a past, and both nation and state are concepts emphasized in the effective heritage of modern historical representation as it developed in the nineteenth century West. Sembene's Senegal has experienced many of the ambivalences and difficulties involved in the making of postcolonial nations and states. This theater has two publics: the diegetic audience within the film, which is the Wolof nation defining itself through all the speech it witnesses, and the film-going public which, if African, is constructed as a collective in some way continuous with the first-through national traditions, histories, and politics. Spatially, this discussion is presented in part by setups which do reverse fields, though not in the repetitive binary alternation from one side of an axis of action so familiar from mainstream Western cinema, not without interruption from a cutaway, and with variation in the shot scale of Madior.
