Akrish Adhikari, Princeton University

This talk focuses on a reading of Ousmane Sembène’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood [Les bouts de bois de Dieu] (1960), a fictionalized tale about labor strikes that took place in French West Africa in the late 1940s. In particular, I theorize the role of drumming and women's labor as the media technologies of anticolonial interpellation, that is, how drums and women's voices are essential for calling out to workers and inaugurating their turn from colonial to anticolonial subjectivity.