African Studies Research Seminar Week 6 - An Ordinary Fetishism: Scepticism and Social Creativity in Ousmane Sembene’s Xala

Conveners: Rebekah Lee and Doris Okenwa

Speaker: Robert Freeman (University of Oxford)

Discussion of fetishism appears throughout Osmane Sembene’s 1975 film Xala. This talk explores what the film’s handling of fetish objects, and the idea of the fetish, can tell us about how social change occurs, and about how we relate to, and use, shared language. Through a close reading of El-Hadji – the film’s main protagonist – I show how Xala develops a characterological case for fetishism as a form of social creativity, even as it illustrates the harms that fetishism can cause. I then suggest, using the work of Stanley Cavell, that the same can be said for sceptical accounts of language and its use. The talk concludes by making a provisional case for fetishism in our everyday life.

Robert Freeman is a lecturer in English at Lincoln College, Oxford. He works on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, film and theory, with a particular interest in South and West Africa.