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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Writing the peripheral condition/s: African literatures in France
| Panel |
41. The Art of Wor(l)d Markets: Development, Diaspora, and Narratives of Africa in Europe
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| Paper ID | 221 |
| Author(s) |
Diallo, Elisa
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | African literatures in European languages commonly address positional and relational concerns. African writings in French, for example, often question the Francophone space: they focus on its centralized structure, around France, and reveal its normative and constraining tendencies, around French. They thus undermine the fiction of a naturally homogeneous and integrative cultural space. Within these writings, texts that concentrate on the experience of (im)migration – from former African colonies to France – address these relational issues from a specific perspective : while narrating the experiences of immigrants in France, they unveil the hierarchical structure of the French space itself, and expose it as an assortment of margins, rather than a uniform centre.
In this paper, I will focus on one of these Francophone “migrant writings”: the novel Un rêve utile (1991) by the Guinean writer Tierno Monénembo. Using this work as a case study, I will examine how it raises the issue of the Other/s within: out of the text emerge a variety of peripheral conditions, not only at the margins of the Francophone space but also within France and the French culture itself.
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