Contemporary Congolese Literature as World Literature

Abstract

“Penser le monde à partir de l’Afrique” (Mbembe and Sarr 379) – to think the world from the perspective of Africa.1 Achille Mbembe’s article, which concludes the volume Écrire l’Afrique-Monde, advocates for a shift: not only to stop viewing Africa as a peripheral andmarginalized continent but also to imagine, create, and reflect the world from an African point of view. Mbembe goes further and considers, more boldly, that “there is not a part of the world whose history does not contain somewhere an African dimension”2 (385). Moreover, as he declares with Felwine Sarr in the introduction of the book, “there is no longer any African or diasporic question that does not at the same time refer to a planetary question” (12). The world is intertwined, and Africa is one of its moving centers. In this regard, the Congo drc, formerly the Belgian Congo, with its abundance of natural resources, is often viewed as one of the primary hubs enabling theworldmarkets to function. “The Congo is at the center of the world since 1884 [the date of the Berlin Conference],” declares the writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Maveau). This special issue endorses this perspective but departs fromboth an economic focus and the vision of Congo as a “failed State” (Nay 326) to consider Congolese literary production at the crossing of worlds and languages, mainly contemporary literature published after 2000. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been an “explosion of the editorial demand inAfrican literature” (Ducas 207), anddrcwriters