Justin BISANSWA

History and the Imaginary in the Francophone African Novel

There is a certain critical tradition which sees the African novel as a mirror of African history, cultures, and socio-political reality, and sees it as a constellation of themes of dictatorship, poverty and underdevelopment. In opposition to this tradition, our research project aims to show that the story told by African texts can enchant us with its disenchantment, because it is first and foremost a work of imagination and, in this sense, it falls within the realm of the imaginary. The text is a linguistic artefact, a construction, organisation, and structure. We should therefore examine the value of the fantastic, symbols and metaphors and assess how they contribute to the production of the story’s meaning. Thus, the abundance of sun, birds, plants, also speaks of utopia and the dreams of these text societies, who aspire to a radical change in their situation and an improvement in their living conditions. The stories told by novelists should not be conflated with those told by historians. This project will invite us to read these texts differently.