Sortir de l’africanité, un défi pour la littérature francophone africaine. Le cas d’Alain Mabanckou

This contribution sheds new light on the problem of outdated Africanness in French-speaking African literature. Its objective is to demonstrate how Mabanckou's romantic prose oscillates between rejection of Africanness and quest for the universal. In Mabanckou, the Africanness dear to negritude is an outdated value for the contemporary writer on pain of falling into a suicidal identity withdrawal. Aware of the openness to otherness in a diasporic context, the characters of African origin carry out self-flagellation through a critical rereading of the history of Africa and African cultures. Consequently, French-speaking African literature is taking a new turn in which the quest for the universal constitutes the permanent challenge. Child of the postcolony and traveler as a citizen of the world, Mabanckou pigments world literature in French with certain aspects of Congolese culture whose virtues extend toall men on the planet. For the French-speaking writer, the time has come to conquer universal values for a transcultural identity.KEYWORDS:Africanity, universal, French-speaking, novel, Mabanckou.