Eléonore Yaméogo, the director of the documentary Paris mon paradis, is from Burkina Faso, where the preeminent international festival of African film, FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou), is held biennially in the capital city of Ouagadougou. Paris mon paradis is a documentary about how the myths of return and of Eldorado keep reviving the influx to and suffering of African migrants in the Occident. In the quest for “salvation” and wealth, Africans are quite regularly heading to the global North, their idyllic goal. This film focuses on migrants to Paris—to the country of their former colonizer—and on the tireless struggle that characterizes their lives. The Eldorado of France has been portrayed and demystified in other works of sub-Saharan literature and cinema. Ousmane Sembène was perhaps the first filmmaker to show the tragedy of immigration from Africa to France in his La Noire de… (1968), in which a young African woman kills herself to end her loneliness and despair. Like Sembène’s short film, Yaméogo’s documentary also explores the issues related to migration. Shame haunts all of her characters’ lives—both the lives of those who experience success but feel they are failing to share their good fortune with others, and those who end up returning to Africa empty-handed. The film also asks central questions that go beyond individual epistemology—questions about what it means to be an African and about the role of Africa within modernity, especially given the colonized past of sub-Saharan nations.

Paris mon Paradis asks, for example, about the place occupied by the African nation-state in the dramas of it emigrants. It might appear to us now that the “nation” is a defunct unit of analysis, especially given the work of scholars of globalization theory such as Hardt and Negri and Arjun Appadurai. With boundaries between nation-states becoming all the more porous in the global economy, where the production of a simple T-shirt spans several different countries, the concept of the “nation” seems to be less and less appropriate as an analytical tool for understanding the global condition. Yet for many people the nation is as real as it has ever been. While the globalized elite manage to shuttle around countries seamlessly, collecting multiple passports and citizenships (see Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke UP, 1999), a new version of a global lumpenproletariat still exists. These are the new dispossessed: refugees, illegal workers, the group of people who fall under the category of “modern slaves.”

This is why we must continue to talk about the nation. We might consider the question of the nation in two ways. First: the conditions of globalization can only be understood through reconsidering how its foundations lie in the development of the nation-state. Second: the nation-state has provided the foundations of modernity today. Many Africans, as modern subjects, are “left out” of contemporary assumptions about modernity. Perhaps now is the time to return to Frantz Fanon, the key philosopher who first clearly articulated the uniqueness of the postcolonial subject’s condition. To understand fully what a modern African or any postcolonial subject is, according to Fanon, requires “a complete calling in question of the colonial situation” (Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1968, 37). A modern African subject, as such, cannot possibly be constituted outside Western frames of reference and knowledge. The documentary Paris mon paradis (2010) raises all these important issues.

Sisters in Law, a documentary directed by Kim Longinotto and Florence Aysi, was a winner of the Prix Art et Essai at the Cannes Film Festival. The film concerns the local politics of the city of Kumba, in the Anglophone section of Cameroon, and focuses on a number of very disturbing criminal and civil cases. The filmmakers follow Vera Ngassa, a prosecutor, and Beatrice Ntuba, a judge, as they pursue justice and a kind of grassroots feminism. A pre-pubescent girl has been raped and left bleeding. A six-year-old girl is beaten with a coat hanger, her body scarred with welts. The wife of a callous, vengeful, and cruel man seeks help in obtaining a divorce. Despite the brutality of the stories, all of the individuals, along with the townspeople who observe these events, experience or assimilate them with remarkable serenity. Later, when the law acts in defense of the innocent and punishes the culprits, there is not only a sense of triumph and vindication on the part of the women, but even a sense of uplift in the community as a whole. In its critique of sexism and colonialism, the documentary may be said to demonstrate Althusser’s expansion of Marxist theory in positing “Ideological State Apparatuses,” particularly the institutions of the law and of the family (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1971)

The prosecutor and the judge are in many ways acting as storytellers or translators engaged in subverting and changing the dominant social discourse. When Michel Foucault analyzed the creation of “truth” in scientific discourse, he examined the role of economic and political forces in truth-making and the control, distribution, “diffusion and consumption” of truth via societal apparatuses (Power/Knowledge, Harvester Press, 1980, 131–32). Each society, he explained, creates a “regime of truth” according to its own beliefs, values, and mores. Similarly, when the prosecutor and the judge are enacting constitutional justice, they are not conveying a universal “truth”; they can only interpret and align many versions of the truth, involving translations from local languages into English, the translation of British common law and indigenous legal traditions into the mechanisms of the legal system, and even the translation of truth from the Bible. This documentary enables the audience to recognize “truth” as the construct of the political and economic forces that command the majority of the power within the social web. At the same time, without invoking any false universals, it celebrates the triumph of justice and the strength of those who have the courage to utter the truth.