ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 interrogates racialised borders through Emily Apter's provocative article, “Theorising Francophonie” (Comparative Literature Studies, 2005), in which she problematises the territorial exclusion of formerly colonised francophone subjects from French national space. The literary analysis in this chapter focuses on Fatou Diome, a writer whose defence of immigration from Africa shocked French television audiences in 2015 and is reflected in her 2017 collection of essays, Marianne porte plainte! Diome's critique of French and European exclusionary cartographies frames the discussion of her autofictional novel, Le ventre de l'Atlantique (2003) [The Belly of the Atlantic] (2006), through which I explore the tropes associated with black mobility using the Glissantian schema of “geographic collusions and contaminations”, self-reflexive narrative strategies and the figure of the errant writer.
