Alain Mabanckou and the Category of World Literature

This paper argues that Congolese-born French writer Alain Mabanckou is the architect and creative entrepreneur of a world literature project that unmakes the Francophone African novel into a world literature text and recalibrates the relations between literary traditions in the category of world literature. The undisciplined intertextuality of Mabanckou’s Verre cassé [Broken Glass], the novel that propelled him onto the global literary marketplace, serves as a good example of the new geopolitics of literature that the writer envisions. These are horizontal geopolitics, along the lines of what Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o theorized, albeit in utopian fashion, as “globalectics,” meaning a horizontal way of doing and reading world literature.