Performative Authorship: Francophone African Novelists in the late 20th-21st Centuries

Focusing on four contemporary francophone writers with roots in West and Central Africa—Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Bessora, and Léonora Miano—Performative Authorship develops a new theory of authorship based on both written text and embodied performance. In order to better apprehend what it means to be a writer in the highly mediated realm of literature in the 21st century, this volume proposes a model for understanding contemporary francophone authors and literature and its specific applications to, and implications for, Black authors who participate in the French literary field. Because of the traces of colonial legacies still present in a literary sphere that is far from colorblind, contemporary authorship is performed and understood in specific ways by Black authors writing in French, as evidenced by their staged, constructed, iterative instances of authorial identities that are self-aware and self-reflective. By defining and elaborating the repertoire for francophone African authors, and the ways in which authors at different times resist or accommodate it in writing and in public appearances, this project challenges codified divisions in the study of literature between the academic and the social, between French and francophone. Through their performances in text and other media, the authors in this study demonstrate the constraints (and opportunities) of the literary field in French in the 21st century.

Kristen Stern is an Assistant Professor in Francophone Studies at University of Massachusetts Lowell.