Speaker
Description
This paper explores the trope of the road in two contemporary Francophone African literary texts, Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe’s Les Lumières d’Oujda (2020) [The lights of Oujda] and Felwine Sarr’s La Saveur des derniers mètres (2021) [The taste of the last metres]. Both texts revolve around the theme of mobility that also has a role in structuring the narrative (cf. Peterle 2016). The texts foreground contemporary global mobilities, approaching them through different literary genres: Oho Bambe’s slam novel focuses on Afroeuropean clandestine mobilities whereas Sarr’s travel chronicle maps out the author-narrator’s work-related journeys across the world. The texts attest to the “conspicuously uneven” qualities of contemporary global mobilities (Huggan 2009, 3) – on the one hand, clandestine migrants’ precarious “stepwise journeys” (Schapendonk 2013, 11) from Africa to Europe, and the effortless hypermobilities of the global kinetic elite, on the other. Despite the discrepancies between these categories of mobility, the texts share similarities in their uses the trope of the road (see Coulibaly & Agnessan 2023) and their formal explorations with the mobility theme. In Les Lumières, the road is invested with material and metaphorical meanings: it is both an infrastructure facilitating migratory journeys but also a symbol for the migrants’ precarious errantry. In La Saveur, the road is linked to modern modes of hypermobility as the author-narrator travels by car from peri-urban airports to the cities he is visiting. La Saveur contrasts the road with the street, associated with the urban space and slow mobilities. My reading focuses on the uses of the trope of the road in these narratives of mobility and pays attention to their poetics of mobility (Toivanen 2021, 18-20), namely their strategies of translating the thematic representation of mobility into literary form.
Biography
Dr Anna-Leena Toivanen is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland. She has published widely on mobility-related themes in African literatures. She is the author of Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures (Brill 2021) and co-editor of Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). She is currently editing a special issue on public transport in African literatures for English Studies in Africa (forthcoming in 2024) and working on her second monograph Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan).
