Des littératures-mondes en français: écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine by Oana Panaïté (review)

Oana Panaïté uses 'Pour une "littérature-monde" en français', a manifesto signed by forty-four writers that appeared in Le Monde des livres on 16 March 2007, and Pour une littérature-monde, Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris's collective volume published in its wake (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), as a springboard for a far more developed and sophisticated investigation of contemporary prose writing in French. While the original 'Manifeste des 44' combined an openly polemical rejection of francophonie with an at times reductively celebratory championing of world literature, Panaïté's study is a rigorous and thoughtful examination of the specific form of contemporary francophone aesthetics. The book is in some sense a work of literary history, covering a large range of texts and theoretical movements, and sets out to identify the particular novelty of contemporary world literature in French as it emerges from and confronts current trends in migration and transcultural interaction. Rather than focus closely on a few given examples, the volume has a broadly thematic structure, divided into sections on impasses and frontiers, the subject, time and memory, and language, each section drawing on works by a range of writers from the Hexagon and other French-speaking countries. Acknowledging both the uses and the limitations of the manifesto's polemics, Panaïté attempts not so much to champion the notion of world literature per se as to identify and analyse the ways in which exile, migration, and transculturation are figured in all sorts of contemporary literary works, and the effects of these experiences on aesthetic form. The merits of this approach is that Panaïté genuinely adds flesh and substance to the littérature-monde movement's claims, and she does this by means of a compelling engagement with a dazzling array of writers, from Pierre Michon and Annie Ernaux to Patrick Chamoiseau and Alain Mabanckou. The thematic chapter headings provide a stimulating forum for richly comparative readings of works across cultural borders while succeeding in pinpointing recurrent preoccupations. The disadvantage, perhaps, is that the study is so broad in scope that it is inclined to become formless, and some of the shared points across the works turn into the familiar and predictable tropes of hybridized identity, provisional remembrance, and linguistic diversity. There might also have been space for a more rigorous critical reading of the littérature-monde movement, since, as Panaïté indeed recognizes, the cultural diversity it upholds is hardly new, and the 'Manifeste' is rather less revolutionary than its proponents tend to suggest. The book is nevertheless a welcome addition to the critical discussion of littérature-monde, not least because Panaïté really does give the notion some more fully developed conceptual substance. It is also a compelling example of dynamic comparative literary criticism and as such constitutes in itself a renewal of what we understand by French studies.