La France et ses autres mondes

In Les Petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles (1988), a humoristic novel which retraces the history of an anonymous African country from colonization to its present days, Emmanuel Dongala’s narrator relates: “[t]hey ruled over us, ran the country, exploited us, taught us their language, sent us to their schools, gave us new ancestors called Gauls. That’s why we still speak French, love French food, and still like to spend our vacations in France, even if these days it is easier to get visa to the moon than to that country.” This seminar reexamines these well captured relations in Dongala’s novel between France and its “other” worlds. How and why has France built and maintained its empire in Africa, Asia and the Americas? How do the leaders of the Francophone world cope with the politics of hegemony put in place by the (ex)rulers? How do the former question and reject the latter in their quest for self-affirmation and nation building before, during and after independence? Our wide range of Pan-Francophone textual and filmic selection from prominent writers and filmmakers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrice Lumumba, Sékou Touré, Christiane Taubira, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Kim Lefèvre, Samin Nair, Jacques Kane, Isabelle Boni-Claverie and Raoul Peck will help us answer the aforementioned questions and classic and newly emerging notions of civilizing mission, Francophonie, Francosphere, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, Afropeanism and Afropolitanism.