ABSTRACTS

The margins of Francophonie

Lydie Moudileno
(University of Pennsylvania)

As we set out to interrogate the validity of the idea of a littérature-monde against an allegedly obsolete Francophonie, we urgently need to reflect on the limits, the paradoxes and the failures of Francophone studies as we have constructed and practiced it in the last decades.
In my presentation I propose to examine the ways in which Francophone studies, in its efforts to construct a legitimate canon, has in turn produced its own margins. Due to economical, cultural and editorial forces, the field of Francophone literature has seen a dual evolution since the 1980s: On the one hand, it has confirmed its status as an institutional discipline, with the formation of a highly visible postcolonial canon; on the other hand, the very visibility of this canon has often translated into the invisibility or exclusion--of other productions: Texts published locally and circulating outside French editorial structures, popular genres such as romance and crime novels, texts from underrepresented regions (such as French Polynesia) are just a few examples of what I consider the margins of contemporary Francophone Studies.
How does the littérature-monde vision propose to account for these productions? Is the advent of the new and highly visible littérature-monde another instance of canon-formation, whose process will inevitably lead to more exclusions (of the non-cosmopolitan, for one)? Or does the novelty of literature-monde reside precisely in its potential redefinition of our field, which would shatter some, if not all of its constitutive hierarchies? In other words, how new is the new vision offered by littérature-monde with respect to the marginalization/inclusion of certain regions, genres and authors, against the backdrop of a continued struggle for legitimacy, representation and universalism? Acknowledging and dealing with the margins of Francophonie appears to be one the major challenges for the new littérature-monde, or for that matter, for any twenty-first century substitute to the old Francophonie.