Literary tourism, littrature monde, and the ethics of conversation in Ernest Ppin's L'Envers du dcor

Abstract

Advocates for jettisoning the term francophonie in favour of littrature-monde argue that francophonie, as a word and a concept, represents the legacy of a colonial relationship that places France at the centre of the globe. One of the pernicious effects of such an organization is how the francophonie label prepares readers to approach the text as a sociological tract or an opportunity for literary tourism. This article focuses on this last problem: how can one shift the way that readers approach a text? In analyzing Ernest Ppin's L'Envers du dcor (2006), it suggests that Ppin offers one path for the transformation of tourists and by extension, of readers. Informed by douard Glissant's theorization of la potique de la Relation (1990), this reading of Ppin develops a theory of the conversation as a means of answering the question posed implicitly in the littrature-monde manifesto, transforming the relationship between readers and texts within the French literary sphere.