Francophone Literature as World Literature

Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, Bertrand Westphal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501371110
• eBook ISBN: 9781501347153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

Part I

Systems and Institutions of Literary Francophonie: Language, Written Culture, and the Publishing World

1

African Literature, World Literature, and Francophonie

Bertrand Westphal

There once was a tower in Babel. Afterwards, it was a real mess.

—Raharimanana

Each African country is a living Babel.¹

—Nimrod

If one considers literature on any scale other than that of the text alone, one wonders if we have been paying sufficient attention to the deep and multiple impact of globalization, a phenomenon that, in keeping with a certain tradition of cultural exception, one prefers to call, in French, mondialisation. Skeptical about such a possibility, Achille Mbembe observes in “L’Afrique qui vient,” an essay published in the impressive 2017 collection edited by Alain Mabanckou Penser et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui, that “we have, then, shifted away from the human condition to the planetary condition.”² The suggestion, accordingly, is that literature is now inscribed in the world, if by “world” we mean real, daily life, or, in more theoretical terms, literary discourse’s “referent.” But literature is also inscribed in the world in another sense, namely, the world perceived in its macroscopic dimension, as a globe. The latter evokes a playground for planetary stakeholders in a borderless economy or, conversely, the grievances following lost illusions for the planetary victims of an economy that erects barriers of water, brick, concrete, or barbed wire at every crossroads. The planetary condition evoked by Mbembe defines, however, the Age of Diasporas, and, to use one more time the Cameroonian philosopher’s language, this condition has inspired, for example, “Afro-diasporic creations.”³ Likewise, and from a more strictly literary perspective, we could also speak of the diasporic readership that emerged at this planetary moment. Furthermore, Mbembe’s statements prompt us to ask what exactly this refocusing of scholarship on the planet and its scale means for African literature in general and Francophone African literature in particular. What are the conditions under which this literature is produced, circulated, and interpreted? Which institutional and market factors shape its reception, and in what ways are these planetary relationships amenable to change? Under which circumstances can African literature be said to break out of lingering colonial dynamics and reposition itself in the international canon? The following pages take stock of how we got where we are and prospect future modalities of achieving more equity on the world literature scene.

1. Out of the “Colonial Library”

We did not have to wait until recent years to take a macroscopic approach to literary studies and their infinite variations.⁴ It was just that we had to wait a little more in a country like France than elsewhere. In the 1960s, critics began to realize that literature should no longer be the prerogative of a small number of European and North American theoreticians. It was not acceptable any more to reserve the monopoly on literary analysis to a culture and generation whose education had been framed by the ethnic, gender, and sexual norms in place in nations jealously protective of an often-colonial past imbued with a presumed civilizing mission. Consequently, in the human and social sciences, the situation started evolving. In France, this happened as the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, among others, received significant response. Here and elsewhere, the 1970s were decisive, for it was at this juncture that a shift occurred, and, henceforth, the articulation of new approaches to literature and theories thereof would take the cultural, historical, and political particularities of the subject of enunciation into account. At the beginning of those years, it was still conceivable, however, that Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky could debate the meaning of history and human nature on the set of a Dutch TV program without ever considering the heterogeneity of planetary cultures.⁵ At the end of the decade, their discussion was to take a different turn, as demonstrated by their growing militancy on various political fronts. Then, in 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, which was translated two years later into French. Thus definitively launched, postcolonial studies provoked a questioning of epistemological foundations on university campuses, especially in the United States. The novelty of Said’s intervention was—to state the obvious—of great importance: it became apparent that, at the heart of the academy, there was not just a single point of view in matters of representation and its politics, but such angles were legion, and, finally, their ongoing multiplication became widely accepted. At the same time, scholars realized that the ultra-dominant perspective that had hitherto characterized Western literary studies was perfectly identifiable. It was the one that was soon to be subsumed under a stock catchphrase: Dead White Males. To have any chance at entering the international literary canon, you had better be white, male, and dead, that is to say, “sanctifiable.” In this context, the spring of 1988 could be considered a symbolic date. In this last year of the Reagan era, 500 Stanford University students marched through the campus, accompanied by Reverend Jesse Jackson. Their demand was more pluralism in syllabus development and especially in reading lists. The students’ warrior-like slogan spread beyond the walls of Stanford and even past California’s borders: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.” The protestors did specify, however, that the issue was in no way about expelling Plato or Aristotle from the Republic of Letters; if that had been the case, it would have been a serious mistake, for these thinkers themselves were the first to demand the ideal society not be reduced to the heritage of Dead White Males. In any event, the bottom line is that, from this point forward, when analyzing, say, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, no one hesitated to weigh it in comparison to Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial play, Une Tempête (1969).

Postcolonial studies substantially altered the world’s Anglophone university landscape, for it was not just the US academy that was affected. France, however, at least between 1980 and 1990, still had a long way to go. I will limit myself here to just one example, namely, cinema. A mere few months after the protest at Stanford, the jury of the Venice Mostra awarded its special prize to Camp de Thiaroye by Ousmane Sembène. The film commemorates a bloody episode whose responsibility was incumbent on the colonial occupier: the massacre of seventy Senegalese soldiers in December 1944 in the camp referred to in the movie’s title. Like The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembène’s film, coproduced with movie studios from Tunisia and Algeria, was only shown in French cinema theaters in 1998, after a considerable ten-year delay (while it took, I might add, The Battle of Algiers, whose initial projection was censored, only five years to be distributed).⁶ In both cases, the subject embarrassed those, still numerous, who were reticent to evoke what former president François Hollande finally acknowledged, on the occasion of an official visit to Dakar in October 2012, as “the shadowy part of our [French] history.” He confirmed his position during a commemorative ceremony held in the Thiaroye camp, in November 2014, in the presence of Macky Sall, president of the Senegalese Republic.⁷ At the same time, I might note that La Victoire en chantant (Black and White in Color) by Jean-Jacques Annaud received the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1977. The result of a Franco-German-Swiss coproduction with the Ivorian Film Society, the film stages a vehement satire of colonialism. It went practically unnoticed in France, as it did in West Germany. Côte d’Ivoire, where the film was shot, entered it into competition under its own banner, and that is how La Victoire en chantant won the Hollywood trophy. This reaction is symptomatic of a context in turn accounting for the belated emergence of postcolonial studies and postcolonial concerns overall in France, at the beginning of the new millennium.⁸

2. “I Don’t Know What littérature-monde Is. I Don’t Know What French Literature or American Literature Is Either”

At the same time the postcolonial model of analysis was permanently settling into the Anglophone university landscape and speculation about the substance of the literary canon was growing, a new reflection on Goethean (and, though we forget it sometimes, Marxian) Weltliteratur took off, especially in comparative literature departments in the United States.⁹ Of course, the conversations that brought Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann together in Weimar are well known and need not be rehearsed here. I will only remind the reader that one of them, dating from 1827, relates to the opening up of literature to the world and the ensuing necessity to conceive of a Weltliteratur. While a segment of the European intelligentsia was coming under the sway of nascent Orientalism, Goethe argued in favor of including non-European works in the international canon. He admired in particular Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. There were limits to this inclusivity, however. For instance, African literatures, especially those from the sub-Saharan region, went completely unrecognized, a situation that changed with the rise of postcolonialism and, then, with the discipline of World Literature, which, on this and other grounds, has now succeeded Weltliteratur. Parallel to that of postcolonial studies, the growth of World Literature involved taking up immediately the question of the place of literatures on the bookshelves of the planetary library at a time critics across the academy were probing the impact on Western culture of traditions considered extrinsic to it. Thus, those we wrongly or rightly call “minorities” finally saw themselves “centered”—at least by comparison with the more marginal positions previously occupied in the literary world-system—under the combined pressures of postcolonial, gender, and queer studies. Reread in this way, world literature has opened up literary scholarship to creolization, cultural hybridization, as well as inter- and trans-culturality.

Importantly, the study of world literature is not confined to abstract reflections concerning the state of literature in the age of globalization and “fluid” societies. World literature also feeds a ripe editorial market, and to the extent that inclusion in the global implies considerations of an economic nature, the study of world literature must attend to these. Moreover, we cannot forget that between Goethe and the 1990s came Karl Marx, as did Pierre Bourdieu. The first really material reflection on the vagaries of what could be thought of as world literature emerged at the very beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as the Nobel Prize for Literature. The irony of the story is that Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite, also gave his friends the idea of making a canon—a cultural canon with a “humanist” vocation, in keeping with the terminology of the time. This humanism had very local ties, and its universalism was biased; to put it bluntly, it was Eurocentric. Consequently, African literature was, for a long time, confined to the margins of European attention or even ignored altogether. The world had to wait until 1986, when Nigerian Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for this marginalization to come to an end. Subsequently, though, only three African laureates garnered the distinction: Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (1988) and South Africans Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J. M. Coetzee (2003), who has since become an Australian citizen. The works of Ahmadou Kourouma, Assia Djebar, and Chinua Achebe were not recognized by the prize; the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo might still have a chance.

But there is, beyond the coveted Nobel, another internationally prominent forum of recognition, complete with its own market with a long-established t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading Francophone Literature with the World
• Part I Systems and Institutions of Literary Francophonie: Language, Written Culture, and the Publishing World
• Part II Francophone Spatialities: Cities, Landscapes, Environments
• Part III Relational Identities: Sex, Gender, and Class in Francophone World Arenas
• Part IV Francophone Literature and Planetary Intertexts
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright