Clandestine migrant mobility, European peripheries, and practical cosmopolitanism in Fabienne Kanor’s Faire l’aventure

Abstract

The present article focuses on the representation of clandestine migrant mobilities in the novel Faire l'aventure by the Franco-Caribbean author Fabienne Kanor. The analysis has two lines of inquiry. Firstly, it focuses on the protagonist's clandestine travels from Senegal to European peripheral insular locations, which are portrayed as unsatisfactory substitutes for the 'real' Europe that the protagonist pursues. In so doing, Faire l'aventure associates peripheral European spaces with the melancholic loss of an unreachable dream -in this case, Central Europe. Secondly, I analyse the novel's conceptualizations of popular cosmopolitanism, which I refer to as 'débrouillardise cosmopolitanism' in order to highlight its qualities as a practical survival strategy of a clandestine African traveller. By analysing the manifestations of practical cosmopolitanism in Kanor's novel, this article pays attention to the limits that the concept faces in the context of clandestine Afroeuropean migrant mobility.

Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean

“…This body of research attests to existence of slavery in the global era and exposes the links between current forms of forced labour and historical human-trafficking. These continuities are also present in contemporary fiction addressing clandestine African migrant mobilities, as attested by novels such as Fatou Diome's Le Ventre de l' Atlantique (2003), Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes (2009), Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street (2009), and Fabienne Kanor's Faire l'aventure (2014) (see also Toivanen, 2016Toivanen, , 2019bPhaf-Rheinberger, 2017).…”