A Comparative Study of Crime and Punishment in Ousmane Sembène's Le Docker Noir and Albert Camus's L'Étranger

Both Camus and Sembène wrote to expose a legal system that unjustly punishes the outsider, "the other": in L'Étranger, Meursault deviates from society's norms and must be punished for it; in Le Docker Noir, Diaw Falla is a man of color who presumes to achieve social and political...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAfrica today Vol. 52; no. 3; pp. 83 - 96
Main Author Day, Patrick
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Indiana University Press 22.03.2006
Subjects
Black people
Capital punishment
Criminal justice
Criminal prosecution
Film noir
Legal systems
Novels
Prosecuting attorneys
Protagonists
Racism
France
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Summary:Both Camus and Sembène wrote to expose a legal system that unjustly punishes the outsider, "the other": in L'Étranger, Meursault deviates from society's norms and must be punished for it; in Le Docker Noir, Diaw Falla is a man of color who presumes to achieve social and political equality with whites, and for this reason, he too must be punished. In neither case is justice served disinterestedly: Camus was writing from a moralist-humanist perspective, and his anti-capital-punishment message was meant to be applied universally; Sembène was seeking more specific social and political reforms for Africans: for both writers, the French judicial system was symptomatic of French society and its attitudes as a whole.
ISSN:0001-9887
1527-1978
1527-1978
DOI:10.1353/at.2006.0026