French in Africa, Africa in French

Today, the continent with the most French speakers in the world is Africa. African authors, such as Ananda Devi and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, are profoundly reinventing the French language, picking up Paris’ most prestigious literary prizes along the way. And given the rapid demographic growth of the continent, the legacy of the French language is increasingly and inevitably entwined with African stories and realities. In spite of this, the representation of Africa in French departments across the globe remains poor and problematic. In the United States, for example, the majority of departmental resources are devoted to literature and culture from France, while all the other regions of the world where the French language thrives— a dazzling diversity of deserts and oceans, of cities and archipelagoes — is indiscriminately lumped into a single “Francophone” category.  African texts written in French that do make it into curricula are judged against Eurocentric benchmarks and studied for their "anthropological" value rather than for their creative and stylistic innovations. My presentation will unpack and explore these dissonances. What are the scholarly, ethical and pedagogical implications of a continued gaze towards Europe, when Francophones across the globe have long demonstrated the rich and often contradictory dimensions of the French language and the stories it tells? How might we reimagine the ways in which the language is taught and studied? What new resonances might the concepts of “leadership”, “equity” and “inclusion”  then acquire?