A poetics of opacity: disability, race and gender in Khady Sylla's Une fenêtre ouverte.
Une fenêtre ouverte/An Open Window (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of the mental health difficulties suffered by both Sylla and her friend, Aminta Ngom. This article reads Sylla's film as embracing Black female disable...
| Publicado en: | French Screen Studies Vol. 25; no. 4; pp. 361 - 381 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Nov2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=189025173&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 189025173 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 26438941 MBE1 jtl: French Screen Studies issn: 26438941 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Nov2025 vid: 25 iid: 4 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 189025173 10.1080/26438941.2024.2348888 ppf: 361 ppct: 20 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 2.7MB tig: atl: A poetics of opacity: disability, race and gender in Khady Sylla's Une fenêtre ouverte. aug: au: McMahon, Laura affil: Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK su: Disabilities Race Black feminism Gender Black artists Documentary films Female friendship Mental health sug: subj: Disabilities Race Black feminism Gender Black artists Documentary films Female friendship Mental health keyword: disability gender Khady Sylla mad studies race Senegal ab: Une fenêtre ouverte/An Open Window (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of the mental health difficulties suffered by both Sylla and her friend, Aminta Ngom. This article reads Sylla's film as embracing Black female disabled subjectivities that have been historically constructed – through intersecting patriarchal, colonialist and ableist regimes – as abject or aberrant. While scholarship on Sylla's film has addressed ideas of female madness, it has not engaged with (Black feminist) disability studies – a critical lacuna addressed here. Drawing on ideas of opacity (Glissant), 'mad methodology' (Bruce) and Black feminist disabled perspectives that question emancipatory or healing coherence (Pickens, Nack Ngue), the article reads Sylla's film in terms of a poetics of opacity that opens to a cripping of cinematic time and space. While focusing on a relationship of female friendship, solidarity and care that offers refuge from fraught familial dynamics, the film's empathy is capacious, extending to Aminta's mother and daughter too. As Une fenêtre ouverte traces the tensions that structure these various relationships, it reveals its feminist approach, its mode of feeling in solidarity, to be one that embraces strategies of opacity and ethical ambiguities. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of French Screen Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: French Screen Studies holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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