12 - The colonial and postcolonial Francophone novel

Summary

What is the 'Francophone novel' in relation to the 'French novel' and how do these two traditions form a continuum? This chapter will give an overview of French-speaking areas of the globe beyond Europe (excluding Canada which will be dealt with separately in the next chapter). It concentrates on those areas of francophonie that share a history of colonial domination: sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, with brief mention of the Mashreq.

These locations have played a crucial role in the development of a specifically French imaginaire since the Renaissance. From Montaigne's cannibals to Montesquieu's Persians, from Baudelaire's exotic tropical islands to Flaubert's Egypt and Nerval's Orient, from André Gide's Voyage au Congo to Hergé's Tintin au Congo, the colonial encounter has marked the imagination of European readers, allowing them to project onto foreign lands and cultures an imaginary reality largely constructed through discourse. Written into Western narratives, the real human subjects of the French empire who were educated in the language and culture of the colonisers have been forced to negotiate with these representations of their identity. Their self-knowledge continues to be mediated by these discursive and literary examples, and many have reacted in strong opposition to these Afriques imaginaires