From environmental degradation to the waste economy of postcolonial desire: Ecocritical footprints in Touki Bouki and Hyenas

Abstract

There is a tendency, among Mambety critics, to overemphasize his formal innovations and parodic contents, his virtuosic collages and subtle nods to auteur and genre cinema, at the expense of a sustained engagement with the acute environmental sensibility running through all his films, notably at the start of a film career that is contemporaneous with the Great Sahel Drought of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article focuses on the ecocritical edge neatly blended into the narrative structures and visual aesthetics of the classic Touki Bouki and Hyenas. The point is, through a minute analysis of the tropes and metaphors of lack, scarcity and abundance, to cast a sharp light on the deep-ecological angst informing Mambety’s cinematic gaze.