this a Copernican shift is to adopt the very imagery of the French rayonnement culturel in order to challenge its assumptions. The manifesto asserts that, in terms of cultural influence, the Francophone world can no longer be conceived through a heliocentric model, whereby France would serve as the bright sun at the center. To the contrary, cultural influence in the French‐speaking world is now indisputably multidirectional.
Although most writers can agree with the manifesto’s call for greater attention to and authority for non‐European authors, some are less sanguine about the possibility of liberating authors from a complex linguistic and colonial heritage simply by declaring French a global language. If the notion of world literature may indeed help authors to reimagine their place without appearing overly beholden to the national culture of a former colonizer, does the term resolve the material restrictions holding back the circulation of a true “world literature”? In his foundational book What is World Literature? David Damrosch addresses just this point by highlighting the obstacles to translation that maintain certain literatures, and particularly those that do not conform to shared notions of what literature from certain places should be, in a subaltern status (Damrosch 2003). In the case of African literature, Damrosch points out the difficulty authors can face if their works do not engage with themes regarded as essential to making any literature truly and characteristically “African” for a global readership. Damrosch gives the example of the work of Mbwil a M. Ngal, a writer from Zaire (the present‐day Democratic Republic of Congo) whose Giambatista Viko: ou, Le Viol du discours africain (Giambatista Viko, or the Rape of African Discourse, 1975) presents a narrative about an African professor who seeks to write the next great African novel by combining the western novelistic form with the secrets of African orality (Damrosch 2003, 113–117; Ngal 1984). What ensues is a biting critique of all sides of the anticolonial and nationalist debates of the 1960s and 1970s that spares no one and therefore serves no one politically. As a result, the novel and Ngal’s work have remained vastly understudied and untranslated, an example that incites Damrosch to ask how we can aspire to speak of a world literature worthy of the name when novels such as Ngal’s remain neglected and inaccessible.
In addition to concerns of translation and circulation, certain authors have memorably cast doubt on the ability of the French language to carry a politically enfranchised African literary voice. In a polemic addressed to his African peers entitled “Ecrire sans la France” (“Writing Without France”), Cameroonian author Patrice Nganang calls upon his fellow writers to take up a more frontal combat against French cultural heritage, the need for which is “autant inscrite dans la langue qu’il utilise que dans l’expérience qui a forgé sa conscience” (as inscribed in the language they use as in the experiences that have forged their conscience). Nganang casts doubt on the possibility of achieving cultural and intellectual liberation within the French language, stating that although this “pas de deux étrange” (strange pas de deux) between African authors and the former colonizer’s culture, “s’il débouche à la fin sur le chant énergique, sur la parole forte et libérée de l’écrivain, au fond, sincèrement, ne le libère pas du tout” (though it finishes on an energetic song set to the empowered and liberated voice of the writer, in the end, truthfully, does not liberate him at all) (Nganang 2004). Responding to this text, the author Alain Mabanckou challenges the view according to which any literature penned in the language of the colonizer is condemned to subordination. Mabanckou asks: “Être francophone, cela empêcherait‐il d’être un écrivain?” (Does being Francophone mean that one cannot be a writer?). Mabanckou, a signatory of the “World Literature in French” manifesto, then underlines his view of a global framing of the French language and its literature: “N’avons‐nous pas encore compris qu’il y a longtemps que la langue française est devenue une langue détachée de la France?” (Have we not yet understood that the French language has long become a language detached from France?) (Mabanckou 2005). Whether or not such detachment is conceivable, Mabanckou points out that below the surface of Nganang’s argument is a demand that African authors shun French cultural heritage in favor of a notion of African authenticity whose very origins lie in colonial domination, and whose criteria were themselves responsible for the most egregious forms of postcolonial violence by independent governments seeking to “re‐Africanize” their culture and people.
Mabanckou’s stance reflects an eager defense of African authors’ ability to write and be read as fundamentally cosmopolitan creators of literature. This argument resists the tendencies of readers of African literature, and indeed of the publishing industry in general, to approach works by African authors through a restricted lens that seeks out a clear, autobiographical relationship between the author and his or her work. Mabanckou circumnavigates these expectations by focusing on the talent of the writer to create multi‐faceted fictional worlds and to do so without any obligation to reflect urgent global injustices of the present. Why, one might ask, would such an imposition be placed systematically on African authors though not on European or North American ones? And why, Mabanckou further asks, can an African author who happens to hail from one of the former French or Belgian colonies not write in French without appearing to pay homage to the former métropole? In his novel Black Bazar (Black Bazaar, 2009), the narrative’s main character, nicknamed “Fessologue” (Buttologist), is a Congolese man living in Paris, who exists not to reflect the hardships of an immigrant African community, but rather as an asserted presence and fact of life in the urban vibrancy of the capital. The novel does not delve into the tribulations of his existence but depicts the humor and flamboyance of an enthusiast of “la S.A.P.E.” (Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes), a kind of African dandy figure, living among the well‐established African community of contemporary Paris.
Mabanckou’s view on the possibilities of a “global French” literature resonates with that of writers in different contexts, for example the defense of “Afropolitanism” as described by Taiye Selasi, an author of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent, who characterizes her identity as local within the context of certain cities, rather than as native to a single country (Selasi 2005). Among Francophone African writers, this cosmopolitan identity is more fitting for a contemporary generation of migrant authors who are not limited to writing about their home countries but also create fictions doubling as commentaries on French, European or North American society. Contemporary African authors having worked in this perspective include the Cameroonian Calixthe Beyala or the Congolese‐born French writer Wilfried N’Sondé. Writing some of their works against the backdrop of the underprivileged outer‐city neighborhoods of urban France, these authors reflect what has been called an “Afropean” generation of creators. In the vein of such writers, Léonora Miano’s novel Blues pour Elise (Blues for Elise, 2010) breaks the mold of the stereotypical politically engaged African author by focusing on African women in Paris, not as adrift migrants struggling for acceptance, but as locals of the city who participate in and contribute to its cosmopolitan vibrancy.
Cosmopolitan reframings of an Afropean literature do not preclude the notion of political engagement, which continues to hold a great deal of currency. For many contemporary authors, writing about Africa from a politically engaged perspective is less an act of duty than one of conviction. They do not contend, as Mongo Béti and writers of an earlier generation once did, that authors must write primarily to defend Africa or to call the former colonizers to task for misdeeds of the past and present. They appear even less concerned with defending the quality of an “authentic” African literature and its right to exist. Rather, they unflinchingly assert their place on an equal footing within a global literary constellation of authors. Their work highlights the error of discussing contemporary novels about Africa as addressing specifically African problems. If authors such as Léonora Miano and Alain Mabanckou may also set their novels on the continent, it is not to address issues they portray as specifically African, but rather to examine them as part of a broader human story. Indeed, any depiction of human and historical realities on the continent is inextricably linked with global narratives of civilization, modernity, and development. This is as true in Miano’s poetic novel La saison de l’ombre (Season of the Shadow, 2013), an imagined retelling of a population decimated by the demands of an emerging transatlantic slave trade, as for In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo, Inc. (2014), the tale of a young Ekonda who
