The Afrotopic Economies of Felwine Sarr

Abstract

Senegalese writer, scholar, and public intellectual Felwine Sarr has risen in international prominence over the last decade due to his contributions to a wide range of interdisciplinary, public projects of social engagement towards African global equity. This article considers these projects in light of Sarr’s disciplinary origins as an economist and his early transdisciplinary forays into literature. I argue that Sarr’s first three literary works – Dahij (2009), 105 rue Carnot (2011), and Méditations africaines (2012) – subtly interweave economic analysis with representations of African subjectivity and relationality. I show that Sarr’s early literary work critiques the existing global systems of values, symbols, and narratives that have always constructed Africa as a site of crisis, impoverishment, and exploitation. They then center intimate humanistic concerns as dissenting acts against global capitalist ideologies. This analysis shows Sarr’s literature to be emblematic of contemporary reconfigurations of African literary engagement.