World literature in French; or Is Francophonie frankly phoney?

Abstract

However valuable as a term defining – by a shared language – a grouping of nations, ‘la Francophonie’ proves imprecise and divisive on closer analysis. In the field of literature, ‘Francophone’, despite its etymology (and the consequent absurdity of the phrase ‘Francophone literature’), has paradoxically come to exclude white writers from metropolitan France. At a time when the population of France is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic, any exclusion tainted with racism is particularly inappropriate. The centralizing mentality of France, politically motivated in the seventeenth century and entrenched over the years, is at odds with the ambition of universality except in terms of an assumed superiority through conquest or paternalism. The ‘mission civilisatrice’ has become the more insinuating ‘présence française’. For the literary scholar alert both to postcolonial discourses and to the heretofore marginalized texts of French literature dealing with blacks as well as to the dynamic contribution by black writers to literature in French, a new term is proposed: ‘la Francographie’. To replace the binary polarisation of French and Francophone, which fosters oppositional stances, comes a new model appropriate for our computer age: the net.