Introduction

Summary

Some of the most exciting and stimulating literature to appear during the last few decades has been written by men and women living in, or originating from, former colonies of the various European powers. This is certainly true in the case of France and francophone literature. While not quite matching the regularity with which non-metropolitan ‘English’ authors have carried off the Mann Booker prize in recent years, winners of the most prestigious French literary prizes have included a significant number of ‘francophone’ writers: the Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf (Prix Goncourt), Ivory Coast's Ahmadou Kourouma (Prix Renaudot) and a string of writers such as Jonathan Littell (Goncourt), Dai Sijie, François Cheng (Prix Femina) and Andreï Makine (Goncourt/Médicis) who are at best French by ‘adoption’. Moreover, one of the latest additions to the group of forty ‘immortels’ who make up the Académie française is the celebrated Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. The tenuousness of the link between the French national space and an increasingly dynamic domain of literary output is one of the key, perhaps defining, characteristics of the field this book sets out to investigate: francophone literature. Yet it is highly questionable whether the term ‘francophone literature’ can be applied with any degree of accuracy to an easily identifiable and unchallenged corpus of texts. Part of the reason for this is that the word ‘francophone’ itself has become something of a label of convenience that often masks as much as it reveals.