The Question of the Periphery in Francophone Literature
Abstract
Why does African writing remain peripheral inside a literary space that presents French as a shared language?
Literature, language and power · Full reading edition
African literature as the South of Francophonie
The teaching of literature in France, and also in Britain, helps keep African writing inside a literary ghetto. It is treated as taxonomically inferior to metropolitan works and held at a distance from the supposed nobility of the language celebrated by defenders of French universality.
This hierarchy restates Gramsci’s Southern Question. African literature in French becomes the South of Francophone literature: a periphery whose very existence presupposes a metropolitan centre.
Literature reproduces the geography of domination
If there is a periphery, there is a metropolis; if there is a South, there is a North. The distinction between the Black Francophone writer and the white French writer reproduces within literature the broader division between dominant and dominated peoples.
The preference for national literature cannot be explained solely by taste or quality. Literature is connected to institutions, schools, libraries and cultural power. Keeping peripheral cultures at a distance is one way in which empire preserves its intellectual ascendancy.
Lilyan Kesteloot and the struggle for recognition
Lilyan Kesteloot’s work demonstrated that French extends far beyond the Latin Quarter. Her scholarship, teaching and preservation of oral traditions connected Congo, Cameroon, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and made the recognition of Black Francophone literature an issue of equality.
Yet African and Caribbean authors are often better known and taught in Canada or Switzerland than in France, and sometimes remain insufficiently taught in their countries of origin.
Edward Said and imperial disciplines
Edward Said observed that comparative literature, English studies, cultural analysis and anthropology were historically affiliated with empire. Universalising discourse frequently assumes the silence of non-European peoples and incorporates them into a hierarchy without truly hearing their literature and ideas.
Teaching an African writer in France simply as a writer comparable to a French author would alter perceptions inherited from colonial domination. The resistance to such equality shows that the literary periphery is not marginal to Francophonie: it is one of its central political questions.
The voice of the periphery
The peripheral voice emerges through resistance to falsely universal discourse. Négritude and the works of Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Damas, Alioune Diop and Mongo Beti created such a counter-space.
Equality within Francophone literature will remain an illusion until African and Caribbean works circulate, are taught and are criticised as constitutive parts of the common literary field rather than as exotic annexes.
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