African Youth in the Global Economy: Fatou Diome's Le ventre de l'Atlantique

Comme eux non plus ne sont pas notre centre. L'Europe est notre périphérie.

[Much in the same way that they are not our center. Europe is our periphery.]

—Ousmane Sembène

On croit que les migrants sont nus quand ils arrivent sur une nouvelle terre au bout de leur odyssée, les migrants sont pourtant gros de leurs histoires personnnelles, lestés de celle que l'on dit collective.

[People think immigrants are naked when they arrive in a new land at the end of their odyssey, yet migrants arrive layered with personal stories and burdened with what passes for collective memory.]

—Abdourahman A. Waberi

igration to the French métropole has been a constant feature of francophone sub-Saharan African literature from colonial times to the contemporary moment of postcoloniality. Naturally, this phenomenon can be located in a much broader transhistorical economic and political framework in which the displacement of populations over several centuries has been a common denominator. These factors have much to reveal with regard to the dynamic between the symbiotically related spaces that are sub-Saharan Africa and France. Indeed, explorations of colonial history have helped to better contextualize recent trends in population movements between Africa and France and France and Africa, and have convincingly demonstrated the complex and complicated connections evidenced in the mythic construct of France evoked by colonial and postcolonial subjects. The Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, who resides in the French city of Strasbourg in northeastern France, explores the bilateralism of French-African relations in her novel Le ventre de l'Atlantique, thereby inscribing herself in a long intertextual genealogy of African writers for whom this mediation has been foundational to their writings.¹

Whether one is satisfied or not with the terminological pertinence of globalization or the French mondialisation in order to designate the nature of human relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fact nevertheless remains that cultural, political, and social discourse is infused with conflicting interpretations as to the constitutive or divisive attributes of the local and the global. A broad range of texts that include Benjamin Barber's Djihad versus McWorld, Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire and Multitude, and Jean-François Bayart's Le gouvernement du monde have privileged categories such as ethnicity or inter-"civilizational" competition, underscored the potential of popular resistance to hegemonic forces, or demonstrated how transnational networks further inscribe the centrality of the nation-state in order to interpret new configurations and alignments.² Indeed, as Saskia Sassen has argued,

The specific forms of the internationalization of capital over the past twenty years have contributed to mobilizing people into migration streams. They have done so principally through the implantation of Western development strategies. . . . At the same time the administrative, commercial, and development networks of the former European empires and the newer forms these networks assumed under the Pax Americana (international direct foreign investment, export-processing zones, wars for "democracy") have not only created bridges for the flow of capital, information, and high-level personnel from the center to the periphery but . . . also for the flow of migrants from the periphery to the center.³

However, a unique set of circumstances inform the African context, particularly if one takes into consideration regional and national particularities that might include a broad range of colonial and decolonizing experiments, recent experiences of national sovereignty, vast discrepancies in natural resources, uneven border control, and examples of population mobility, as well as complex regional trade networks. Naturally, "through these apparently novel forms of integration into the international system and the concomitant modes of economic exploitation," as Achille Mbembe has shown, "equally novel technologies of domination are taking shape over almost the entire continent."⁴

"The greatest of...