This project is the culmination of years of thinking through some of my dissatisfactions regarding the field of African literature and its relationship with certain theoretical directions in literary studies in general. While African literature in general (and specifically Francophone African literature, the primary area of my study) has been, since the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most fecund fields of literary production, it remains on the margins of literary studies. Though many American and European universities have specialists in African literatures and though Francophone literature has gained a place of visibility for itself, the study...

Boubacar Boris Diop is one of Senegal’s most prominent contemporary writers. His literary production spans the period from 1981 to the present. In addition to being an author, he has been a journalist, a teacher of philosophy and literature, and an activist. He has written several political texts and has become an important voice in debates on the politics ofla francophonie.¹ After the completion of his novel in 2000 on the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, he turned to Senegal’s other national language, Wolof, inDoomi Goloand returned to French with his powerful 2006 novel,Kaveena.² Today...

Based in France, Tahar ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s most prolific and internationally known writer. While his career dates to the early 1970s, one could say his fame is due to his prize-winning 1985 novel,L’enfant de sable(Sand Child), and its sequel,La nuit sacrée(Sacred Night). This fame has been accompanied by much controversy, inside and outside Morocco, primarily because he is seen as a writer who caters to the orientalizing gaze of theWest. His success is often attributed to a perceived willingness on his part to offer to the Western reader portraits of Morocco and of the...

In chapter 1, I discussed Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel on the genocide in Rwanda and said that much of Diop’s work is turned toward catastrophe, be it literary, historical, political, or mythical. His 1997 novel,Le Cavalier et son ombre(The Rider and his Shadow), is written in the confluence of all these catastrophic dimensions, especially the literary and the political. By foregrounding the relationship between law and storytelling, this novel urges us to question where the law of the story comes from and how and why storytelling and figurality require an abeyance within Law, “Law” being perceived as foundation...

Abdelkebir Khatibi’s thought haunts this project from its first pages. Therefore, it is only fitting that the last chapters be dedicated to direct and sustained engagement with Abdelkebir Khatibi, as a writer and as a thinker. This double engagement is made necessary by Khatibi’s oeuvre, which seldom distinguishes, in clear lines, the literary from the nonliterary. He calls his own literary work “une écriture pensante” (a thinking writing), thus highlighting the conjunction between writing and thinking. I have adopted this framework of “écriture pensante” in my approach to all the texts so far. Yet the question of thinking remains to...

In chapter 2, I opened the question of the relationship between transcendence and the imagination, arguing that the movements of transcendence are related to the distancing dynamics of the subject from itself through thought and imagination. I showed how the very possibility of survival requires this kind of distancing. In chapter 4, I further emphasized the necessity of this distance for therécitby highlighting the genealogical rupture that characterizes la Bi-langue and the story “L’oiseau conteur,” as interpreted by Khatibi in “La voix du récit.” In this chapter, I turn my attention to the mystical tradition of Islam through...

A dynamic that haunts this book from the very first pages comes through explicitly in the final chapter. This dynamic is the question of the feminine: as excess, as madness, as satanic, in short, the feminine as catastrophic. It is perhaps necessary to highlight briefly the character of this notion of the feminine, with full awareness that the varying facets of the feminine in literature is a subject that requires a thorough study of its own, which I hope to undertake in future projects. For now, I wish to reiterate that the notion of the feminine deployed throughout these texts...