Gravitational model. Vicious Circle of the (Non)existence of the Literary Field of Francophone Sub-Saharan Literature of the Anticolonial Period
Abstract
In 2005, Benoît Denis and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg published La littérature belge. Précis d'histoire sociale, the essay which deals with the problematic of the center and the periphery.
It is applied on the Belgian-French context and the authors analyze the process of the identity recognition of the minority literature by the majority literature. This model is based on two forces: centripetal, assimilation, and centrifugal, differentiation.
The center and the periphery affect each other mutually through the diverse and continual tensions. We use this methodology to explain the elements which influence the collective memory of colonized and the identity question described in Sub-Saharan literatures entering the French literary field.
The engagement for the establishment of the real Sub-Saharan literary field becomes the engagement for the recognition of the identity connected to the space transformed by the colonial politics. Those literatures represent the social engagement in the allegorical description of the life conditions of the colonized.