“Pour une littérature-monde en français”: The End of the Francophone World as We Know It?

In 2007, 44 writers and intellectuals signed the Littérature-monde manifesto, a critique of the Francophone literary state of affairs. The manifesto hailed the advent of a new era in French-language letters: out with the centerperiphery dichotomy, in with a less hierarchical, rounder world sharing French as its language of literary expression. This essay shows how, although claiming the opposite, the manifesto overtly decontextualizes and universalizes instances of language production in French, becoming thus an argument for the consolidation of status quo editorial practices that still view the Francophone literary world as gravitating around a well-defined metropolitan center.