Rethinking receptivity in a postcolonial context: recasting Sembène's Moolaade

Abstract

The main challenge confronting African postcolonial societies is the failure of political, social, and cultural transformation to confront and transcend the limitations imposed by historical and contemporary contingencies. Hence the task of postcolonial theorists is to develop conceptual resources for a more sustained evaluation and analysis of the challenge. In this article, I recast Sembène's film, Moolaade, in a new relief to foreground the core issue of the postcolonial condition. I proceed to reappropriate Kompridis's concepts of ‘reflective disclosure’ and ‘receptivity’, which he develops from Heidegger's ‘world disclosure’, to devise what I term ‘postcolonial receptivity’. I then argue that postcolonial receptivity is an important concept that lends more intelligibility and coherence to the African quest to transform social and political forms of life.