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Sitting in a small apartment, the main character of Haroun’s A Season in France (2018), Abbas, reads Achille Mbembe’s Politiques de l’inimitié (2016). The act of reading this significant book can be understood as resistance on the part of Abbas and as overt criticism of power on the part of Haroun. Resistance to the structural violence perpetrated on African immigrants – the ‘marginal(ized)’ population of the empire – is still a necessary act in the twenty-first century. This is an act that reveals the ‘nocturnal face’ (i.e. the colonial world and its reverberations) of the democratic order (i.e. France as a colony), as Achille Mbembe instructs us. In doing so, Haroun’s film blurs the lines between the ‘categories’ of postcolonial African film and postcolonial French film, perhaps even resetting the boundaries of diasporic cinema in the process. In order to study this paradigmatic shift, I propose to investigate the continued frailty of the postcolonial condition in Haroun’s film through the issue of love – a marginal theme in its own right in the canon of ‘African’ cinema, but perhaps the key to transcending death-worlds and death itself.