In our paper we show how Black writers (those of Africa and those of the Black diaspora in Europe and America) have contributed to the intellectual work centered on the idea of Africanity. We explain to what extent literature, as one of the domains of culture, reflects different visions of Africa, as formulated in the discourse of the World Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956 and Rome, 1959). With reference to the official texts presented or elaborated during these events, we expose in which way literature is involved in the decolonial remapping of the geocultural place of Africa and in the remodeling of the postcolonial literary geography while pointing out the precursory or heralding character of certain postulates whose echoes will be heard during the festivals of negro and pan-African art of the 1960s and whose relevance is also confirmed nowadays.

Introduction to “Contemporary Hegemonic and Anti-Imperialist Discourses in Literature and Culture: Postulates, Visions, Aesthetics”

The aim of this article is to trace the socio-political context in which Frantz Fanon’s thought reached left-wing French and English-speaking intellectuals in Montreal between 1950 and 1970, and to analyze the reception of the theses of the author of The Wretched of the Earth in the discourse of these circles on culture and art, especially literature. The reading of Fanon’s main concepts becomes here the object of a certain cultural-political interpretation, in which strategies of adaptation or even appropriation make it possible to inscribe Fanon’s work in the Franco-Quebecois independence struggle in the era of the Quiet Revolution or to link the identity aspirations of the Quebec Black minority with the demands of the Black Power movement as well as the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. In these different contexts, literature has its own distinct tasks, inextricably linked to the aspirations of the societies within which it is produced. From defending the language of the dominated to creating a new vision of the world and of man, through direct involvement in political affairs: the writer, according to Fanon interpreted in Quebec, becomes one of the central figures of the revolutionary struggle.

The purpose of this paper will be to analyze the assumptions of two main texts in the collection Manifestes published in 2021 by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, namely “Manifeste pour un projet global” (2000) and “Manifeste pour les ‘produits’ de haute nécessité” (2009) which, in a gesture of anti-colonial revolt, claim a consciously utopian vision of the future of the French West Indies. In the context of other programmatic writings published by Glissant, as well as by Chamoiseau, we will attempt to examine the ideological roots of the conceptions formulated in the manifestos, to place the project articulated in them in a broad context of the anti-colonial debates of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as to identify the portrait of the writer-intellectual, as it is drawn up in these texts L'objectif de cette communication sera d'analyser les présupposés de deux textes principaux du recueil Manifestes publié en 2021 par Édouard Glissant et Patrick Chamoiseau, à savoir le "Manifeste pour un projet global" (2000) et le "Manifeste pour les 'produits' de haute nécessité" (2009) qui, dans un geste de révolte anticoloniale, revendiquent une vision consciemment utopique de l'avenir des Antilles françaises. Dans le contexte d'autres écrits programmatiques publiés par Glissant ainsi que par Chamoiseau, nous tenterons d'examiner les racines idéologiques des conceptions formulées dans les manifestes, de placer le projet articulé dans un contexte large des débats anticoloniaux de la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle, ainsi que d'identifier le portrait de l'écrivain-intellectuel, tel qu'il se dessine dans ces textes.