The “Condition D’immigrés” in Fatou Diome’s the Belly of the Atlantic and the Aesthetics of Migration in the Francophone African Literary Tradition
The “Condition D’immigrés” in Fatou Diome’s the Belly of the Atlantic and the Aesthetics of Migration in the Francophone African Literary Tradition
Through an analysis of Fatou Diome’s 2010 novel The Belly of the Atlantic, this chapter rethinks Jacques Chevrier’s definition of migritude, which he describes as a recent cohort of African writers in France who narrate existence between Africa and France and for whom immigration and exile are central themes. The chapter argues more narrowly that migritude writers disclose what Diome terms the “condition d’immigres”; that is, they image the conditions and structures of immigration as a national and international network of systems expropriating the means of movement from formerly colonized peoples and that these systems have a colonial past. In addition, it unpacks Diome’s conversations with the Négritude tradition, noting that, at the same time she borrows from her authors, she refashions aspects of Négritude in terms of migration. She reappropriates, for example, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s black humanism, and mobilizes it into her global twenty-first century as a migrant humanism challenging immigration under neoliberal globalization.
Keywords: Migritude, FatouDiome, Imperialism, Globalization, Africa, Négritude
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