ABSTRACTS

Packaging Worldliness: The Epitexts of Littérature-monde

Richard Watts
(Tulane University)

The manifesto for a littérature-monde in French argues for the definitive decoupling of the French language from France and its neo-colonial institutions (namely, la francophonie in all its guises). By extension, it seeks the divorce of literatures in French written in and representing a great many parts of the world from the French milieu littéraire, which in the new space-time of littérature-monde has been decentered, a "centre relégué au milieu d'autres centres". Extending arguments that I first developed in Packaging Post/Coloniality (2005), this paper considers the ways in which the paratext and, most notably, the epitext (those elements such as book titles, illustrations, cover art, epigraphs, dedications, blurbs, and prefaces that present the book-object to the reader) to works of this putative littérature-monde effect a rupture with the conventions, strictures, and geography of the French literary institution. How do these works signify their desire to escape the bounds of what Pascale Casanova calls the literary center's haughty regard of ethnocentric ignorance (353)? How are they positioned through the use of visual and textual markers as detached from the French literary field (from France, tout court) and engaged with global concerns? Finally, to what extent is this detachment limited by the fact of the metropolitan French production and distribution of the vast majority of these works? To answer these questions, I will put the epitexts to works that self-consciously identify as part of this emerging littérature-monde (principally though not exclusively written by the signatories of the manifesto) in dialogue with the epitexts to the works that are clearly subject to the centripetal force of the French literary institution. This will, more to the point, take the form of a comparative analysis of the packaging of works produced by the recently shuttered publishing house Le Serpent à Plumes and Gallimard' series Continents noirs. The epitexts to works published by Le Serpent à Plumes suggest a despecified and often unidentifiable otherness, whereas Continents noirs, a series whose abolition is sought by many of the adherents of the manifesto for a littérature-monde, explicitly situates that otherness. While it is tempting simply to associate the first with openness and the second with limitation, I will argue that Le Serpent à Plumes strategy of presentation runs the risk of semantic drift; similarly, while Gallimard's racially coded series is anachronistic, its epitexts occasionally offer a salutary localization of the works in question.