MODERN COLONIZATION, RACIAL-CULTURAL IDENTITY STEREOTYPE, AND ANTI-COLONIAL RESISTANCE IN SEMBENE OUSMANE’S “THE PROMISED LAND” :(A Post-Colonial Approach in Literature)

This research paper discusses the phenomena and the arousing impacts of the modern colonization of the French white family toward the African black maiden as reflected in Sembene Ousmane’s “The Promised Land”. The literary work reveals the story of a Senegalese black girl, Diouana, who greatly idealizes to be a very successful housemaid in “the promised land” of a French white family in European country. Nonetheless, the girl’s dreams ruins in bad luck, misery, and suffering for the white master and family’s domestic colonial treatments, exploitations, and oppressions. This domestic brutality emerges since the white family considers that the Senegalese black girl belongs to the different racial and cultural identity. The black girl’s attempts to get rid of the white family and to reject working in the white household are really not impactful to change the black girl’s fate, therefore, she shows her last struggle of anticolonial resistance by committing suicide.