The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

Abstract

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.

The work of littérature-monde and the fictional laboratories of Alice Zeniter and Bessora

“…They claim a multiple biological, cultural and literary heritage, and seek to unveil a hidden or under-recognised aspect of the world construed as the shared product of geographical, historical, political and cultural transactions. At the same time, they can reveal complex and often contradictory paracolonial forms of nostalgia and resistance (Panaïté, 2017) that bring together conflicting memorial and narrative strands, contested events, memories repressed, buried or forgotten and not easily arranged into clear-cut moral categories or ideological labels: colonial/anticolonial/postcolonial; national/immigrant; identity/alienation. Novels such as Alice Zeniter's L'Art de perdre and Bessora's Zoonomia (as well as Mathias Énard's Boussole, winner of the Prix Goncourt 2015, or Patrick Deville's Taba-Taba published two years later, to mention only two recent novels in which Hexagonal -that is, not conventionally 'Postcolonial Francophone' writers -also revisit the connections between France and its colonies) combine an ambitious narrative structure which takes the form of family sagas with plots that span decades and casts of characters that include entire generations with a worldwide scope as events and characters move not only across time periods but also across space between countries and continents.…”