African and Caribbean francophone authors are rearticulating the relationships that bind their homelands to Europe and the Americas. Their words move the imagination beyond the worn out tales of subjugation, forging a space freed from the colonizers’ narratives and a future that is theirs to define.
In Africa, the literary and intellectual scene has recently sprung to life. The newfound dynamism surged last October during the Senegalese “thought workshops” (Ateliers de la pensée) in Dakar and Saint-Louis, which gathered Africa’s most cutting-edge thinkers. This innovative initiative—only one of many—attests to the continent’s own desire to wrest itself from old categories and understandings, deconstruct clichés, and interrogate history, all with the larger intent of “decolonizing minds.” As journalist and philosopher Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux remarks “this kind of event…builds a new library that is not so much postcolonial as de-colonial.”
Capitalizing on this momentum, the World Writer’s Festival and Series seeks to bring these new narratives to the forefront of the Parisian literary scene for the space of a weekend, from June 9-11.