Abstract
This article focuses on African literature published since 2000 by authors of French expression. While contemporary authors’ subjects are varied—ranging from climate change, human rights, to ethnic cleansing—they also imagine new “what ifs” and other utopic spaces and places that extend beyond postcolonial, Africa-as-victim paradigms. Literarily, authors such as Abdelaziz Belkhodja (Tunisia) and Abdourahman A. Waberi (Djibouti) have effectuated a transnational turn. In this literary transnational turn, Africa is open to new interpretations by the African author that are very different from the more essentialist-based, literary-philosophical movements such as Negritude and pan-Africanism; cornerstones of the postcolonial literary frameworks of the past. Belkhodja and Waberi offer original narratives for Africa that, while describing their countries as utopias, also traverse the very dystopic realities of our time.
Highlights
In the last decade, many contemporary African authors of French expression from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa posit perspectives in their novels that reveal a global cosmopolitanism that uniquely defines African literature in the 21st century
This article focuses on two African authors of French expression, Tunisian Abdelaziz Belkhodja and Djiboutian Abdourahman A
The dystopic utopias proposed in Le Retour de l’éléphant and Aux États-Unis d’Afrique reveal that the postcolonial African author of French expression finds himself at odds, caught in a “double attachment”, in the middle of what Khatibi defines as “the constantly reemerging world of the colonizer” and the
Summary
Many contemporary African authors of French expression from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa posit perspectives in their novels that reveal a global cosmopolitanism that uniquely defines African literature in the 21st century. Their cosmopolitanism and worldly engagement are evident, what is interesting about these millennial narratives is that in order to explore the present, authors feel the need to tell their stories in the distant future It is here where they create utopias to study the very real dystopic truths that Africa faces in its postcolonial reality. The gleaming city is a technologically advanced urban megatropolis, known throughout the world for its fortunes made through innovations in solar energy and reverse osmosis that have given it inexhaustible sources of electricity and clean water Both novels present North and Sub-Saharan Africa as centers of civilization, culture, and economic stability. Africa is a continent on which, as Waberi writes, “l’homme d’Afrique s’est senti très vite, sûr de lui” (the African very quickly was sure of himself) ([7], p. 54)
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