2021 Volume 16 Issue 1-2 Pages 181-198
This article proposes a parallel reading of three critical, programmatic, and visionary conceptualisations that call for rethinking cultural and political identities from the South and more generally the challenges of contemporary cohabitation (vivre-ensemble): the essay Amarres: Créolisations india-océanes (2005) by Françoise Vergès and Carpanin Marimoutou, Achille Mbembe’s notion of “Afropolitanism” (2005, 2010), and Felwine Sarr's Afrotopia (2016). From their respective locations (La Réunion, South Africa, Senegal), these authors engage with similar issues of cultural reappropriation, deconstruction of the modernist narrative and the imagination of a new relational anthropology. Between realism and utopia, their dissenting and foundational texts illustrate the complex relationships between knowledge, power, and desire – a distinctive feature of manifesto writing. To show the productive links between these three conceptualisations which are located at the interface between the imaginary and the pragmatic, the discussion will focus on their convergent notions of flux and mobility (circulation des mondes) and of plural memory (multiplication des mémoires), but also on the place ascribed to the arts and literature in this epistemological renewal.
