Skip to main content

Description

Djibril Diop Mambéty's exuberant, inventive and urgent film Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena) (1973) follows a young couple, Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Mareme Niang), who dream of leaving their home in Dakar, Senegal for an imagined better life in Paris.

Rosalind Galt's insightful study analyses Touki Bouki's cinematic worlds, from its narrative of postcolonial migration to its influence by international film style, both nonetheless grounded in African visual cultures and critical perspectives. Touki Bouki explores the intertwined histories of the postcolonial and the transnational, exploring how the aesthetic and political ideas found in the experimentation of cinematic modernisms and New Waves are as African as they are European.

Galt's study interweaves a conceptual framework of world cinema studies and anti/decolonial theory with close analysis of Touki Bouki's innovative audiovisual forms and its representations of desire and identity in postcolonial Senegal. Providing a detailed reading of the film's themes and cinematic style, she argues for its classic status and for its long-lasting influence on world cinema.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Africa and Europe
3. Liberated aesthetics: “an African film language”
4. Embodiment
5. Afterlives
Notes
Credits

Product details

Published 02 Apr 2026
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 104
ISBN 9781839029004
Imprint British Film Institute
Illustrations 60 colour illus
Dimensions 190 x 135 mm
Series BFI Film Classics
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Rosalind Galt

Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King…

Related Titles

Environment: Staging