Littérature africaine francophone: de la revendication identitaire à l’altérité dans l’universel

Abstract

The history of Francophone African literature is marked by the quest for difference, originality, and the cultural relationship of novels with public practices opposed to Western fiction. Paradoxically, this aspiration to authentic writing is accomplished in an imported language (French) which is a guarantee of the superiority of Western civilization over peripheral civilizations and a literary genre (the novel) which does not exist in African traditions. Moreover, the use of narrative techniques such as fragmentation and other inherited from some French literary schools demonstrates that it is an appendix of the French literature. Hence the question: To whom the francophone African writers write their novels? The postcolonial poetics will enable us to identify the situation of enunciation assigned in their works of fiction by some French-speaking African novelists and thus defining the statutes of enunciator and co-enunciator. It goes without saying that the enunciative strategy applied by African authors aims at a dual audience: the European public and the indigenous public, which is essentially composed exclusively of the elite because French, in a peripheral situation, is the language of a minority.

Keywords: quest for identity, authenticity, specificity, postcolonial theory, enunciation, periphery