A provocative, even polemical sense of démesure; an immediacy and urgency; a forcefulness and exuberance whose principal aim is to grab attention and solicit a reaction; and a sustained oppositional tone that constructs a manifest againstness. The text of ‘‘Pour une ‘littérature-monde’en français’’appears to contain the characteristic aspects of the manifesto as identified by Mary Ann Caws. It includes and excludes, opposes an explicit ‘‘we’’against an implicit ‘‘them,’’and sets itself up accordingly as a type of battlefield. What interests me in this article, however, is not so much the specific content of the manifesto, as the relationship between its content and three additional aspects of the form identified by Caws: self-sufficiency; an emphasis on newness; and finally, the manifesto’s self-positioning,‘‘between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential’’(Caws xxi). My principal aim is to suggest that the publication of the manifesto has a very clear pre-history and depends on a set of pre-existing, well-established institutional structures, closely associated with the ‘‘Étonnants voyageurs’’festival, the major annual literary event held in Saint-Malo; at the same time, the article uses such contextualization to test the manifesto’s self-sufficiency and originality, suggesting the existence of some major blind spots in its claims. The central implications of the 2007 manifesto are double: they concern, on the one hand, the ‘‘becoming-postnational’’(and by implication what Françoise Lionnet has called the ‘‘becoming-transnational’’[784]) of literature in French, a process reliant in part on the decolonization of the epithet ‘‘French’’and on the now familiar identification of the neocolonial implications of any exclusive