Abstract This article examines Ousmane Sembène's cinema, tracing the evolution of its thematic interweaving of animism, objectification, and commodity fetishism through the colonial and postcolonial ontologies of Senegal. It argues that his films construct a distinctive metaphysics in which bodies and objects continually exchange vitality. Drawing on Wolof folk traditions of totems and ancestral spirits, the article first situates animism as a relational ethic: an ontological “vibrating” with the natural world, as articulated by thinkers such as Gogo Khanyakude and Édouard Glissant. Sembène's films, however, depict a modern distortion of this ethic; under the pressures of neocolonial capitalism, objects such as wagons, medallions, money orders, and masks become newly ensouled, not through the reciprocal spiritual kinship of “anima,” such as spirits and living souls, but through the extraction and displacement of human vitality into something inanimate. Through close readings of Borom Sarret, Mandabi, Xala, and La Noire de . . . , the article traces how Sembène materializes Marx's theories of commodification and alienation while advancing an epistemologically African critique of the spiritual corruption of capital. In these narratives, laboring subjects lose not only agency but metaphysical coherence—morphing from bodies into objects—while commodities accumulate quasispiritual power and corporeality. This dialectic reaches its most potent expression in the chiasmic exchange between Diouana and the mask in La Noire de . . . , in which the protagonist's dehumanization culminates in the mask's uncanny animation. Situated alongside Fanon's phenomenology of objecthood and Glissant's poetics of relational trembling, the article argues that Sembène articulates a postcolonial aesthetics of soul displacement: a cinematic philosophy where modernity reconfigures the sacred, capital becomes totem, and humanity's ancestral relation to the world is violently rerouted through the machinery of neocolonial power.
Miles Monga (Fri,) studied this question.