ABSTRACTS

_Littérature-monde_ and the issue of the vernacular

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
(University of California, San Diego)

The Pour une littérature-monde en français manifesto, first published in Le Monde on March 16, 2007, tolled the knell of the idea of francophonie and announced the emergence of a model more appropriate to our transnational era- that of a littérature-monde in French that would displace the center-margin model inherited from colonial times. Geared towards French literary institutions, which stand accused of perpetuating the marginal status of non-metropolitan authors, the manifesto rejects the consecration of the ever-growing distance between authors emblematic of the exclusive category of 'French Literature' and the world, the hallmark of a novelistic tradition exclusively centered on itself. Instead, the forty four signatories of the manifesto propose a vision receptive to the autonomy of various linguistic and literary productions in French free from any preponderance of metropolitan culture. France is demoted from its central position and becomes part of a new multi-centered whole open to difference and otherness-à l'inconnu du monde- et à l'inconnu en nous (Manifesto).

In his essay La Nouvelle Chose Française'. Pour une littérature décolonisée, Nimrod emphasizes the political relevance of the issue of language in the literature of the former colonies. Accession to independence goes hand in hand with the elaboration of a distinct language, one resistant to the cultural imperialism of the metropole. The difficulty lies in the conciliation of two or more cultures, which in colonial times were apprehended through hierarchical models only. As a counterpoint to such visions, Nimrod evokes the hybridity of Ahmadou Kourouma's prose, which oscillates between Malinke, the main language of creation, and French, the language of translation and of a new creativity enhanced through this cross-pollinization. For Nimrod, Kourouma is one of the many African authors whose writing creates a dialogue between cultures but also within one's own, an accomplishment which bestows upon this kind of literature the privilege of universalism and, therefore, upon the margin from which it has emerged, the status of potential center.

In this vein, I study the production of Algerian Berber author Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche in the light of his negotiation of his two cultures- French and Kabyle- through the crucible of poetry. I argue that Jean Amrouche's conflation of symbolist poetic aesthetics and 'traditional' Berber oral poetry puts to the fore the ubiquity of certain strands of aesthetic practices independently from geographical, cultural, or historical considerations. By elaborating a poetics inspired both from canonical French modernism and Berber forms of expression, Amrouche obliterates the primacy of the center/margin paradigm of cultural development and disengages 'traditional' forms of expression from primitivist recuperations. Through his struggle to impose Berber vernacular forms of poetry as an aesthetic model on a par with French ones, Amrouche opposes plurality to a normative vision of the French canon. In this sense, he can be considered to be a notable precursor of littérature-monde.