Chapter 7 - Unworlding Paris

Summary

This chapter argues for the need to view Paris unexceptionally. It acknowledges and moves beyond universalising or celebratory tendencies of Paris-centric theories of world literature. Exploring the literary expression of what I term migrant-flânerie, the chapter analyses forms of epistemic encounter and intimacy found in three novels of migration to Paris by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mbella Sonne Dipoko and Gauz. These texts reinvent and recycle the nineteenth-centuryflâneurand his leisured navigation of the city. The writing engages themes of alienation,ennui, and freedom in relation to racialised, masculine experiences of the city. In contrasting ways, these African-centred narratives of Paris ‘unworld’ the city space by giving literary form to encounters that disrupt resilient critical claims to aesthetic or epistemic universalism. They present experiences of migrant-flâneriecompressed into specific everyday spaces (the bourgeois apartment; student digs; the department store; the café; a boat on the Seine; security checkpoints) and delineated narrative temporalities (diary form; coming-of-age narrative; ‘a few nights and days’). These formal devices evoke recurrent tensions between abstract, aestheticised promises of freedom and everyday experiences of racism and coloniality.