Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category?

The corpus of texts produced by Afrosporic authors in Europe is characterized in the first place by plurality: plurality of the languages used, of the authors' African heritages, and of their European locations, all this adding to the specificities of individual experience. Moreover, Afrosporic literatures develop in different European countries at different times and follow very different patterns. Does it make sense then, at a time when even the notion of Europe itself is called into question, to talk about an Afro-European literature? This essay seeks to trace commonalities and differences of Afrosporic literary production in different European contexts and argues that a comparative perspective at both a diachronic and synchronic level is paramount to the understanding of new literary configurations across linguistic and national boundaries.