Nouveau monde ou nouvelle utopie ? Sur la tentation transnationale du roman francophone : L’Exemple de Khatibi et Laferrière

Abstract

Abdelkébir Khatibi (Maroc) and Dany Laferrière (Haïti–Québec) belong to different cultural areas, but share the same linguistic practice in a postcolonial context. They are also similar in their conception of writing literature in a transitional world for a global age where the novel, as a Western form in its origin and under its authority, and also as an access point to modernity for the writers of the global South, aims at a certain form of transnational order. Both of these writers reject the dogmatic definition of identity from the perspective of an origin and of a supposed secular pact between fiction and nation. This paper examines the shift between francophone global fiction by way of a “regional criticism.” However, this emerging global rhetoric, recently called “littérature-monde,” may appear as a new utopian paradigm.

Keywords:

• Utopia
• francophone literature
• postcolonial
• littérature-monde
• Khatibi
• Laferrière

Notes

1 Genette, Gérard. Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction. Paris, Seuil, 2004.

2 Laferrière, Dany. Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1985.

3 Laferrière, Dany. Eroshima. Montréal, VLB éditeur, 1991.

4 Laferrière, Dany. Je suis un écrivain japonais. Paris, Grasset, 2008.

5 Khatibi, Abdelkébir. La Mémoire tatouée. Paris, Denoël, 1971.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hassan Moustir

Hassan Moustir is professeur habilité en Littératures maghrébine et francophone in the Département de Langue et Littérature Françaises at the Faculté des Lettres de Rabat. He is a member of Laboratoire 2LAC (UM5 of Rabat), GRELCEF (Western University, Ontario-Canada), GRICC (Université de Moncton, Nouveau-Brunswick, Canada), and is vice president of the Centre Recherches Francophones de l’Université de Leipzig (Germany). His research focuses primarily on contemporary literature of the Maghreb and of the francophone world in the context of postcoloniality and diasporas. He has edited numerous works and has collaborated on several international collectives and journals including Dialogues francophones, Expressions maghrébines, and Actes Sémiotiques.