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for spare change, the voice‐over comments acerbically that the streets of the Latin Quarter were the place “where I found, one morning, civilization in the school of outstretched hands.” In this shift in grammatical number, the voice‐over thereby seems to adopt in free indirect discourse either the presumed inner voice of the on‐screen student or that of the panhandler. With this statement, the representation of an unexpected exchange between strangers in public on the street becomes a possible exchange of voices, and it pointedly takes the place of any standard celebration of the official civilizing mission in French schools. This articulation of the first‐person singular subjectivity of a black African voice coincides with an image of individual benevolence that also ironizes colonial benevolence and promises of equality. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced a work of their own that recorded and centered the speaking subject of a black African man, speaking in French in particular, shifting between the singular and the plural and raising the question of how assimilation related to struggles over decolonization. And in doing so, the Groupe put into their work the first‐person speech of such a figure three years before Jean Rouch worked with Oumarou Ganda in Moi, un noir (Treichville) (Vieyra 1958) to create post‐synchronized voice‐over monologues of fantasy and memory about the experience of migration from the French colony of Niger to the Ivory Coast.

      In the wake of independence in Senegal and throughout the former French colonies of West Africa after 1960, Afrique sur Seine ’s focus on the perspective of educated elite overseas students and migrants already living in the metropole soon appeared to many audiences and intellectuals as signs of a film eclipsed by and displaced from the prevailing project of creating a new African cinema: it did not satisfy later more urgent pan‐African and nationalist goals to retrieve historical examples of forthright anticolonial cultural production. In this sense, Afrique sur Seine embodied neither the agitational fervor of a work of anticolonial denunciation and mass mobilization, such as Afrique 50, nor an attempt at caustic and ironizing reverse ethnography, which later projects by Rouch and African makers would pursue. Rather it served as a sign of and testimony to the reality of various guarded hesitancies, conflicts, and ambivalences of black Africans situated within yet on the margins of spaces of colonial French white supremacy during a time of late colonial crisis. Its construction marked a particular idiom for formulating political and cultural demands for one form of emancipatory possibility and equality in this fraught period of late colonial politics.

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      2 Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 2145, Dossier 3 (n.d.). ANOM FM1/AP/2145/3. Dossier “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic].”

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      6 Buchsbaum, J. (1988). Cinéma Engagé: Film in the Popular Front. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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      11 Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox. 1952). New York: Grove Press.

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      13 Haffner, P. (1984). Quatre Entretiens avec Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (III), Deuxième Partie. Peuples Noirs Peuples Africains 40: 26–40. http://mongobeti.arts.uwa.edu.au/issues/pnpa40/pnpa40_04.html.

      14 Harrow, K. (ed.) (1999). African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

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      17 Lébrat, C. (ed.) (2001). Afrique 50. Collection “Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental” no. 3 (trans. T.L. Williams). Paris: René Vautier / Éditions Paris Expérimental.

      18 Leyda, J. (1964). Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama. London: George Allen & Unwin.

      19 Loftus, M. (2004). Entretien avec René Vautier. Présence Africaine 170, special issue “Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra,” 55–59.

      20 Marie, L. (2005). Le Cinéma est à nous: Le PCF et le cinéma français de la Libération à nos jours. Paris: L’Harmattan.

      21 Marker, C. (1961). Commentaires. Paris: Seuil.

      22 Pfaff, F. (1988). Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–), Senegal. In: Twenty‐Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio‐Bibliography, 289–303. New York: Greenwood Press.

      23 Présence Africaine (1953). no. 14 “Les étudiants noirs parlent…”

      24 Rouch, J. (1967). Préface.). Premier catalogue sélectif international de films ethnographiques sur l’Afrique noire, 20–29. Paris: UNESCO.

      25 Ruelle, C., Tapsoba, C., and Speciale, A. (eds.) (2005). Afriques 50: Singularités d’un cinéma pluriel. Paris: L’Harmattan.

      26 Senghor, L.S. (1956). Ethiopiques. Paris: Seuil.

      27 Thackway, M. (2003). Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub‐Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

      28 Ungar, S. (2011). René Vautier’s Afrique 50 and the Emergence of Anti‐Colonial

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