HCCW: The Work of Wolof Literature and Film in the Age of Neoliberalism

Tobias Warner
French and Italian
UC Davis

This project explored the polyvalent figure of “work” in a Wolof cultural production since the neoliberal “restructuring” of the Senegalese economy. This research entailed a wide-ranging study of contemporary Wolof-language fiction, film and popular culture. The primary goal was to trace a recent tendency to make poetic use of the ambiguity of the term liggéey (work). Liggéey in Wolof can mean labor in the conventional sense, but it also refers to gendered, domestic labor, witchcraft, and techniques of spiritual devotion, depending on the context. The tendency to knowingly superimpose these meanings in Wolof cultural production can be dated to the 1980s and 90s, when the Senegalese state was forced to accept a series of “structural adjustment” loans from the IMF and the World Bank. The research aimed to explore how contemporary Wolof cultural production marshals the ambiguity of ‘liggéey’ to satirize, query and critique the precarity of labor in contemporary Senegal. This research has the potential to generate far-reaching questions about aesthetic practices that engage with the transformations of labor in the current global conjuncture, since Senegal’s period of economic restructuring is in many ways the very prototype of the contemporary politics of austerity currently sweeping the global North.