This dissertation reconsiders the creative and strategic crisscrossings among the African diaspora’s literary and cultural productions, paying special attention to the status and influence of Black America(ns), as a point of reference, on African and Afro-descendant writers working in French. Building upon the works of Paul Gilroy on the one hand, and Frida Ekotto on the other, I trace a major literary lineage in Afro-diasporic literature that revolves around the question of legibility. The texts studied in this dissertation are linked by their focus on a hermeneutic that is deployed along two main lines of thought. At the diegetic level, how are the characters being (mis)read by other members of the African diaspora, and reciprocally, how do the characters see these other members of the African diaspora and situate themselves in relation to them? At the meta-level, how does this reading system, or system of knowledge acquisition, invite or highlight a critique of genre (and gender) conventions and classifications?
More specifically, I look at how writers such as Maryse Condé, Alain Mabanckou, and Léonora Miano establish affiliative ties with their Anglophone peers— Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Teju Cole, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—across the Black Atlantic and across generations, in order to challenge the French system of racial and literary classification. In so doing, I argue that they also participate in shaping the figure of the contemporary black intellectual on a global scale, from a non-American black perspective. The two main objectives of my research are to situate African, Caribbean, and Afro-descendant writers working in French within a transnational literary tradition that transcends the long-lasting polemical—and today outdated—category of “Francophone Literature,” and to account for their contributions to it. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43969 |
| Date | 05 March 2022 |
| Creators | Vottero, Constance |
| Contributors | Cazenave, Odile |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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