2025 Theses Doctoral

Writing and Seeing the World: language, movement and identity in Francophone literature and cinema

Ndiaye, Laetitia M.

This dissertation examines littérature-monde both as a theory and as a practice that takes form through language, movement, plurality, and aesthetic intervention. Emerging from the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde, the movement rejects a self-centered and hierarchical vision of literature in French, challenging the center–periphery model that has long structured francophone literary production. Rather than treating the manifesto as a definitive framework, this study asks how littérature-monde is interpreted and enacted in literary and cinematic works produced by both some of the manifesto’s signatories and by authors and filmmakers who did not explicitly align with it, and how these works give substance to its claims beyond theory.

The dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining close readings of literary texts with cinematic analysis. It engages with debates surrounding francophonie, language, postcoloniality, and global circulation, while foregrounding the formal and material dimensions through which literature and film make the world legible. The corpus consists primarily of French-speaking Black authors and filmmakers of African descent born between 1965 and 1990, many of whom are of Senegalese origin and did not sign the manifesto. This selection does not delimit littérature-monde; rather, it highlights how plurality, decentering strategies, and linguistic reinvention operate in practice, often from positions historically relegated to the margins.

The introduction situates littérature-monde within its historical, political, and literary context by examining the manifesto, its anthology, and the debates and critiques they generated. The first chapter analyzes novels by Fatou Diome and Marie NDiaye, showing how migration, gender, and narrative experimentation deterritorialize French and allow individual stories to speak as part of a shared history of marginalization. The second chapter turns to cinema, examining films by Mati Diop, Maïmouna Doucouré, and Alice Diop, and argues that their work constitutes a cinéma-monde in which bodies, sound, and space articulate the vision announced by the manifesto. The third chapter examines works by Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman A. Waberi, in which reversed geographies and transatlantic mobility remove France as a unique center.

The final chapter, focused on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novels, demonstrates how polyphony and planetary literary networks construct plurality as the condition of narration.

The study shows that littérature-monde matters as a lived, stylistic, and political practice that disrupts literary hierarchies and reimagines universality beyond national frameworks.