A Pan-African Perspective on Apartheid, Torture, and Resistance in Euzhan Palcy's A Dry White Season

This article starts from the premise that Euzhan Palcy's two films Rue cases nègres / Sugar Cane Alley (1983) and A Dry White Season (1989) share a set of thematic equivalences that represent postcolonial perspectives on Pan-African identities and experiences. In both instances the film's focus is on the experiences of black communities and the atrocities they have suffered at the hands of their enslavers or oppressors. Through a detailed textual analysis of torture scenes in A Dry White Season, the article discusses how, despite its fictionality, the film is a form of documentation of police brutality in apartheid South Africa. The subjective points of view of characters who are victimized and tortured under apartheid, or who are witnesses to the torture of others, are key to this. The article concludes that the connectedness between these two films keeps alive histories of oppression across national and regional borders, which in turn invokes Pan-African imaginaries of resistance to ongoing and emergent forms of oppression.