Introduction

In April 1946, Paul Flamand, director of Éditions du Seuil, wrote to the French colonial ministry to request a tonne of paper. The French publishing industry had been severely hit by paper restrictions in the immediate post-war period: 150,000 tonnes were needed to refill stocks which had fallen to a low of 12,000 by 1945. While levels had recovered by 1949, such material consequences of the war were to weigh on French publishing until the mid-1950s....

Book-publishing at Présence Africaine

‘Book-publishing at Présence Africaine’ explores the extent of which the idealized notion of autonomy was transformed by the effects of decolonization on the Parisian publishing landscape. The chapter also reconsiders the radical nature of Présence Africaine’s early publishing work and its role in shaping notions of literary value in the period leading up to and directly following the independences.

Anthologizing the Union française

This chapter is the first in the ‘Institutions’ section of the study, and considers the relative positions and strategies of selected editors who added literary voices concerning the Union française to their catalogues in the late 1940s. Editors included in Bush’s discussion are Paul Flamand at Le Seuil, Charles Fasquelle of Éditions Fasquelle, Charles-André Julien at Presses universitaires de France, and Guy Lévis Mano. Each assessment provides the opportunity to contemplate how anthologies and edited collections engaged with the politically volatile context of the Union française in a period marked by a sustained sense of both guilt and hope.

Conclusion

In post-war France, literary representations of sub-Saharan Africa were written and read in response to political, aesthetic, and commercial imperatives. A greater number of these representations appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s from a flourishing African literary scene which built consciously on the achievements of black writers in France during the inter-war years and as French publishers responded to growing – if still very limited – interest among metropolitan readers. The literary field of this period was gradually reconfigured by decolonization and its destabilizing effect on ideas of literary value and authority and their, often unconscious, attachment to the French national imaginary. This is seen in the degree of meaning attached to African authorship by readers, attitudes towards the French language, and editorial mediations of literary style. Whether explicitly engaged with the complex political realities of decolonization, affirming black cultural identities, or reproducing colonial stereotypes of exotic difference, decisions were made regarding the form, content, and material production of a very wide range of texts. What emerges is a complex portrait of the French-language publishing scene during the so-called ...

Literary prize culture

This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer (ANEMOM). It demonstrates how the ANEMOM gradually adapted to the changing political and cultural context of decolonization during the vingt glorieuses and examines how it sought to preserve certain aspects of France’s colonial imaginary by consecrating the ‘Empire de la langue française’.

Translating Africa in the French republic of letters

‘Translating Africa in the French republic of letters’ is the concluding chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text as well as the book itself, and focuses on the role of translation as a further worldly aspect of literary mediation in the period of decolonization. The chapter suggests that translation depends not only on the relative position of languages, but on material conditions, shaped by the prestige of the translated author and, at times, the translator, and delineates writers’ and translators’ often strained relationships to notions of literary value during the decades of decolonization. By situating three translations in relation to the context of their publication and early reception, Bush considers the ways in which normative ideas of French as a literary language, bound up with the political transitions of this period, informed and accommodated translations of Anglophone African literature.

Editorial craft and literary resistance

‘Editorial craft and literary resistance’ discusses the mediation of style and content of sub-Saharan African novels in the post-independence period through two examples: Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961) and Malick Fall’s much less studied La Plaie (1967).

Authenticity and authorship

‘Authenticity and authorship’ is the first chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text and explores how institutional conditions shaped and responded to notions of African authorial subjectivity in the early post-war period. The chapter builds on the primarily textual analyses of Jonathan Ngate and Michael Syrotinski, concerning narrative agency and African subjectivity, and approaches the discursive construction of an authorial subject in material terms.