In the decade following the end of the war, the socio-economic effects of the Occupation, the political fallout of the Brazzaville conference, and founding of the French Union indirectly impacted patterns of cultural consumption. As African politicians sought to establish citizenship for all inhabitants of the AOF and AEF and to define what that category might imply, a new generation of African writers in French found publishers and readers for their work. The mediation from writer to publisher to reader was rarely straightforward: the stereotypes and clichés which had bolstered the colonial imaginary no longer spoke with such assurance to metropolitan readers. Metropolitan anxiety surrounding African authorship is dramatized memorably in Ousmane Sembène's novel Le Docker noir (1956) and echoed in later wrangling over cases of plagiarism. The assertion of authorship provided a mirror to the more generalized assertion of African subjectivity during the period of decolonization. It exerted particular pressures on metropolitan publishers and their packaging of African texts. Le Docker noir is constructed around a memorable trial scene. Sembene's protagonist, Diaw Falla, is an immigrant dockyard worker and trade unionist in ‘le petit Harlem marseillais’ of France's Mediterranean port. Diaw is also a writer: a Gramscian organic intellectual whose novel is plagiarized in its entirety by a white French woman, Ginette Tontisane, after she promises to act as passeur and find him a publisher in the capital. Diaw's novel, Le Dernier Voyage du négrier Sirius, is published under her name in Paris. It is an immediate success and wins a literary prize. In outrage, Diaw confronts Ginette, and, during their argument, highly reminiscent of scenes of violence from Richard Wright's Native Son, he knocks her to the floor. She dies, possibly accidentally, and Diaw is a wanted man.

Further to the resistant act of Diaw's writing in itself, Sembene's novel diagnoses the institutional structures within which Diaw's actions take place. His crime is reconfigured as rape by the French media in the novel, as racial stereotypes play out throughout his trial.