Alain Mabanckou’s migrant cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Writer Alain Mabanckou, originally from the Republic of the Congo, has worked his way to literary stardom in the French-speaking world and beyond by harnessing a creative ethos born of a cosmopolitan sensibility that is steeped in his experiences of migration as a black man. Living, writing, speaking and teaching between three continents, Mabanckou’s prolific literary output betrays a conflicted relationship to French-speaking Africa’s literary past, and draws on tropes of pastiche and irony to set itself within a global literary framework that demands a world audience. The writer’s work and public persona thus showcase a unique brand of migrant cosmopolitanism.