ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how modernity is rarely defined as a project and, as such, is usually seen less as a question than as an observation. Favouring some Francophone literary contexts in the Indian Ocean, the author examines how some writers position themselves vis-à-vis notions of modernity, universalism, racialisation and the coloniality of power, highlighting, in certain works, what she will define as an “ambiguous decolonial desire.” In the process, she also emphasises the various critical traditions that address the literary phenomenon of the region, the impasses of “hybrid” aesthetics usually celebrated by them, despite the fact that these aesthetics paradoxically intersect the colonial and postcolonial imageries, the silences that are still felt about the place of the “black man” in Indo-Oceanic societies, and the forms of resistance produced throughout recent decades by local literary agents.
