And End to Francophone Literature

This is a pretty good argument.

This is a subject I find myself thinking about more and more, and clearly the problem is more than just semantic. It has to do, I think, with a basic human need to classify, which seems to have become a prerequisite for understanding– as if we can’t understand a writer’s work until we have contextualized him somehow. But in the (dare I say post-) post-colonial context the literary and political milieu of French and Francophone literature has become more complicated. We need a new way of classifying writers who weren’t born and raised in the Hexagone but who persist in writing in French anyway– and the best way to reclassify them may be to declassify them, as Christine Rousseau argues here.

“Pour une littérature en langues françaises” [For French literatures*], by Christine Rousseau (Le Monde, March 25 2010)

Hardly had the ripples caused by the Salon du livre francophone begun to still, in March 2007, when a brick was hurled into the pond, in the form of a manifesto entitled Pour une littérature-monde en français (“For a world literature in French”), written by Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, the founders of the Etonnants voyageurs festival [which takes place in St-Malo every day]. Signed by 44 writers, including JMG Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, Amin Maalouf, Maryse Condé, Lyonel Trouillot and Nimrod, the manifesto announced the birth of a world literature in the French language, and, consequently, the death of francophonie [Francophone literature].

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