Mirroring Domestic Crises of Black Women’s In/Visibility in Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de … and Henriette Akofa’s Une esclave moderne

This article explores the subjectivity of two Francophone black African women’s in/visibility. through Ousmane Sembène’s film La noire de … and Henriette Akofa’s novel Une esclave moderne, I pivot the ways the two works mirror the protagonists’ isolating experience emblematized by the in/visibility that many migratory black women live across transnational spaces on both sides of the Atlantic, a crisis that takes its most palpable and sometimes deadly turn through a socially and ethically oppressive in/visibility. Inspired in part by the work of renée Larrier (2000) and Françoise Lionnet (1995) in postcolonial Francophone contexts and theoretical works in Anglophone spaces like Samantha Pinto’s Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013). I examine how laboring black women’s oppression born of transnational migration informs the states and spaces of in/visibility. Ultimately, this article interweaves, in the transnational context across Francophone and sometimes Anglophone spaces, the fictional accounts of perpetual servitude of black women.