Subjectivités et écritures de la diaspora francophone: Maryse Condé, Alain Mabanckou et Melchior Mbonimpa

The objective of this study is to bring to light the diverse modalities of the enunciation of subjectivity in the francophone literature of the African diaspora. Our analysis focuses on novels by Maryse Condé, Alain Mabankou and Melchior Mbonimpa. In the first part, we formulate a diachronic overview of the concepts of subjectivity and of diaspora. Then, we study the hegemonic discourses constituted as architexts leading to the reification of identities, cultures and collectivities. From that arises the urgency to contest which ends up in a revaluation of identity and in a return to sources. The second part of this research addresses the subjective perspective offered by the enslaved African woman speaking about her existential reality in Maryse Condé's novel I, Tituba, Witch of Salem by resorting to theories of pragmatics, discourse analysis, diaspora, feminism and sociological studies on memory. Resting on the theoretical concept of critical relationality, the third part examines the process of disaffiliation and affiliation created in contact with alterity. This process sets in motion an epiphanic moment followed by an economy of the affect in Maryse Condé's novel En attendant la montée des eaux. In the fourth part, emphasis is placed on the picaresque in Alain Mabankou's novel Verre Cassé, which underscores the context of enunciation that is the precarity of psychological, existential, socioeconomic and political health of the postcolonial and diasporic subjects; a precarity resulting from a historical and systemic oppression that gives rise to the modalities of subjectivity and to the emergence of diverse critical discourses. The fifth part of this thesis studies the identity claim and the cultural appropriation catalyzed by the memory of origins in Melchior Mbonimpa's historical novel, Le totem des Baranda. This examination is done through the causal link between the epic and the diasporic subject's critical subjectivity. The conclusion puts into perspective the connections between major themes explored beforehand and the alternative view of identity suggested by the filiation/disaffiliation/affiliation recurrent conceptual framework.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0