Dany Laferrière as a Japanese writer: Fantasy and despair

Abstract

Dany Laferrière has demonstrated a continuous engagement with Japan, beginning with the novel Éroshima in 1987 and continuing to his most recent publication in 2021, Sur la route avec Bashō. The aim of this article is to understand what role Japan plays within Laferrière's writing and how it helps us understand the complex network of sex, power, and race in his work. Between the cosmopolitanism of the network of nation-states and the despair of identity politics, I situate Laferrière's use of Japan as a fantasy that empowers the writer beyond the impasse of a white-black racial imaginary. Reading Laferrière this way allows us to understand how his writing uses the fantasy of the Orient, often to the detriment of Asian women. As such it contributes to comparative work between Asian and French literatures, debates in Francophonie, and critical understandings of race in the Francophone sphere of the Americas.