Research Projects
Research Project n°1
My current research project explores the collective memory surrounding books in the novels of eight contemporary Francophone African writers of the diaspora (1999-2021). Through literary and computational analysis, it examines how the portrayal of books in African fiction shapes a distinct transnational literary field with its own cultural and institutional actors, norms, and values. This research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is groundbreaking as it is the first comparative study of book representation in African diasporic literature. It sheds light on the involvement of African authors in redefining their literary heritage, reconfiguring the concept of ‘literary field’, deepening insights into book dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora, advancing contemporary African epistemology through the decolonization of colonial knowledge systems and the production of endogenous ones, and finally introducing a pioneering methodology which, as I have shown, can serve as a reference for other areas such as Caribbean literature and its diaspora.
Research Project n°2
My second project centers on Afrofuturist African and Caribbean literatures, an emerging field that remains overlooked. This project builds upon my previous research, where I used digital tools to analyze literature. Here, the focus shifts to studying the portrayal of technology in fiction as the primary subject of investigation. Just like books, technologies disseminate information, shape society, and blur the lines between fiction and reality, enabling African and Caribbean writers to engage with topics related to technological advancements, historical injustices, socioeconomic disparities, and environmental issues, leading to literary breakthroughs, and offering an opportunity for literary critics to be at the forefront of our current technological and anthropological revolution.
Doctoral Thesis
My doctoral research analyzes the representations of the printed book in contemporary Francophone African and Caribbean fiction. I argue that the fictionalized book is a central character in novels and should be studied as such to help us reconsider commonplace interpretations of literary texts. More specifically, the ‘book within the book’ calls into question the supposed lack of historicity of the African and Caribbean novel; analyzes the ways in which language is used; raises the question of alterity; and examines the role of the writer. This study constitutes a first-of-its-kind analysis of the fictionalized book within African and Caribbean literatures. By drawing upon intertextuality studies and the sociology of literature, it helps understand the past and present influence of the printed book in African and Caribbean contexts, about which little is still known. This approach also offers a new avenue of research for reading and interpreting Francophone literatures.
The Elite Africa Project
The Elite Africa Project is a Canadian-based global network of scholars working to challenge predominant understandings of Africa and its elites.
Both in academia and in wider public discourse, African elites have either been ignored or depicted as grasping and self-interested. This framing perpetuates negative depictions of the continent and its peoples and draws on a simplistic understanding of what power is and how it is wielded. Our work aims to counter these perceptions by initiating global conversations about “who leads” in Africa and how they do so.
We seek to disrupt and renew both academic and public discussions of African leadership, refocusing attention on a wider, qualitatively different set of elites from those that have predominated in the past (such as the parasitic “Big Men” of neo-patrimonial politics).