Littératures francophones et esclavage transatlantique

Slavery is a recurrent topic in contemporary Francophone literature from Creole regions, especially in the domain of novel writing. In fact, many writers are seizing upon this historical period and its extreme violence – which, for a long time lay quiet, or merely voiced from the “winners’” perspective, since the enslaved had few opportunities to attest to it – in order to recognise its fundamental place in their post-slavery societies. The sense of the incompleteness of history, affecting their societies, motivates the desires of French creole writers to revisit this history, to fill the gaps. The methods of these rewritings – such as embodying and giving a voice to those who were deprived of one, but also turning them into heroes – position their issues within a dynamic that is political and social as well as literary. Having become a site of reflection about the role of literature in supporting and nourishing humankind, contemporary writing about transatlantic slavery takes its place symbolically between the local and the global