Is globalization a humanism? Pleasure, the world economy, and the global palimpsest according to Gaston-Paul Effa

Abstract

This article deals with multilayered narratives of experiences of globalization in Franco-Cameroonian author Gaston-Paul Effa's 2005 novel, Voici le dernier jour du monde (Monaco: Editions du Rocher). This book sees an African writer return to his fictionalized home country called Bakassi from France, where he had relocated as a child. Once in Bakassi he observes how his compatriots both appropriate global trends and ideologies of pleasure while simultaneously facing extreme forms of economic marginalization as the country falls prey to endemic social violence. I argue that Effa's narrative strategy provokes us to read experiences of Western-led globalism as a palimpsest in which economic exclusion is lived alongside provocatively new and localized understandings of what it means to be human.

Keywords:

• Gaston-Paul Effa
• Globalization
• Humanism
• Africa
• Pleasure
• Narrative

Note

Notes

1. All translations from Effa's novel are my own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Izzo

Justin Izzo is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Brown University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Francophone studies, anthropological theory, literary criticism, and film.