ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how African literature has been instituted as an internationally recognized category of its own. It considers the case of writers from Francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1960s onward. The chapter also considers Francophone African writing as a relatively autonomous universe, with its own narratives, institutions, and events, despite its historical relationship to other kinds of literature. Book markets exist on a national scale, in African countries, in France, but also on an international scale, through translations or through the Francophone book trade. This hierarchized market comprises African countries, but also Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, and it changes constantly. The number of new female writers has increased steadily from the 1980s onward. As a result, if the writers under scrutiny are dominated in the world literary space, their social, cultural, and linguistic resources make them dominants among the dominated. They are, in short, located in a semi-periphery of the world literary space.
