The awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye in November 2009 may at first sight appear to have brought further confirmation of the ‘Copernican revolution’ which, according to signatories of the manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’, has been sweeping through the world of literatures of French expression, casting aside hierarchical distinctions inherited from the colonial era. Yet scarcely had the announcement of NDiaye's triumph been made when it unleashed a furore that showed her to be trapped in a web of identity politics which, in the optic of the manifesto, had supposedly been consigned to the trash can of history. Though the word was not publicly used, NDiaye was, I will argue, treated as a latter-day évoluée.

While deferring unconditional membership to that privileged club that was Frenchness, the French colonial authorities coined the category of évolués in order to designate certain colonized subjects who, through exposure to colonial educational and assimilationist mechanisms, had internalized French cultural and social norms. The racial advocacy organization founded in 2005 known as Les Indigènes de la République has emphasized the transcolonial and transhistorical connections inherent in such mechanisms of hierarchization in terms of their representation of ‘descendants of slaves and deported Africans, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants’ (Mouvement des Indigènes de la République). The treatment meted out to NDiaye highlights the complex positions the writer has negotiated in the process of ‘belonging’ in France as a person of African descent, in a nation state whose Republican ideals and values are supposed to render ethnicity indistinguishable.

The awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye in November 2009 may at first sight appear to have brought further confirmation of the ‘Copernican revolution’ which, according to signatories of the manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’, has been sweeping through the world of literatures of French expression, casting aside hierarchical distinctions inherited from the colonial era. Yet scarcely had the announcement of NDiaye's triumph been made when it unleashed a furore that showed her to be trapped in a web of identity politics which, in the optic of the manifesto, had supposedly been consigned to the trash can of history. Though the word was not publicly used, NDiaye was, I will argue, treated as a latter-day évoluée.

While deferring unconditional membership to that privileged club that was Frenchness, the French colonial authorities coined the category of évolués in order to designate certain colonized subjects who, through exposure to colonial educational and assimilationist mechanisms, had internalized French cultural and social norms.

Travelling is often perceived as an enriching but temporary experience as it implies a return to the point of origin, to one's home. But what happens when the passing travellers are forced to settle permanently in their destination? How do these interrupted journeys affect travellers and their relationships with the locals and themselves? Two short stories by French writer Marie NDiaye – overlooked by critics – explore the consequences of such a situation. In ‘En Chine I’, a nameless narrator travels to China to visit her estranged cousin and the country. Once there, she is compelled to accept a strange pact: to help her cousin, she agrees to let a local woman absorb her identity, a supposedly harmless experience. In ‘En Chine 2’, Patin, a business traveller, also finds himself unable to leave the place that he was supposed to visit only briefly. Seemingly locked inside the pension where he is staying, he is advised to change, to become ‘perfectly Chinese’, if he ever wants to go back home.

In many ways, those two protagonists can be seen as opposite figures. The nameless narrator of ‘En Chine I’ is visiting China as a tourist, while Patin is on a business trip; the former is asked to give away her identity to a Chinese woman, while the latter is being forced to profoundly alter his own by becoming Chinese. Yet, both short stories present a certain number of similarities: the country described in these texts is not the real China, but a place where locals and travellers have to abide by strange and unreasonable rules. In both, the narrator and Patin are perceived as exotic and fall victim to the locals’ obsessive gaze and compulsive desires. Finally, their transformation, which is presented as an unharmful condition to resume their journey, leads to a drastic alteration in the protagonists’ identity and to the impossibility for them to return home.

French travel literature abounds in examples of travellers whose exoticizing gaze prevents them from seeing the country that they visit and its inhabitants. In those tales, locals often fall victim to the Western gaze, which denies their identity, transforms them into objects of desire and can ultimately cause their death.

NDiaye's blank-riddled surfaces can be used in all kinds of astonishing ways. People bring to their fantasies about these chopped-up tales and yanked-out characters a great deal from their own lived experience, prejudice and, perhaps, trauma. There is no universal reader. The fact that I have a Cornish mother (whose Greek father abandoned her when she was eight), a West African father (whose brother was sacrificially murdered at the age of twelve), and was brought up with my two older sisters in an almost exclusively white, working-class town in the northern provinces of a northern European country cannot help but inform much of what I ‘recognize’ (interpret, smell, hallucinate) in the work of Marie NDiaye. And yet these are just a handful of the myriad reasons I may consciously or unconsciously believe that I am well-positioned to ‘talk to the blanks’. In my experience, all of NDiaye's usually obsessive admirers, no matter how intellectually sophisticated, tend to speak as if her writing is being directed at them, as if they have been equipped with the gift of sensing what is ‘really’ going on beneath her enigmatic surface. These readers are variously gendered; they occupy different ages; they live out a range of physical, mental and emotional disabilities and sexual preferences; and they experience the often violent mystery of ‘race’ inside differently marked bodies. I have watched them, in fascination (and usually in a seminar room), arguing passionately (and often making excellent cases) about the obvious reason for Ange's wound; about the malevolence – or not – of the femmes en vert; about whether or not ‘Fanny’ is ‘black’ (or ‘brown’ or ‘yellow’), and why such a question could possibly matter.

The numerous manuscripts in ‘Ajamī discovered in Africa are in striking contrast with the myth of Africa being devoid of writing and significant literature, as conveyed by colonial hegemonic discourses. Alongside the ‘Colonial Library’ or the writings produced by Europeans about Africa during the colonial period and by African intellectuals in French, English, and Portuguese, other libraries have thrived, among which is the Islamic library produced by ‘Non-Europhone Intellectuals’. These intellectuals wrote both in Arabic and in their native African languages (Fulani, Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba, Somali, Amharic, Kanuri, and so on) by using the Arabic script. This form of writing, called ‘Ajamī, enabled these ‘Muslims beyond the Arab world’ to produce a body of works of high intellectual quality and value, dealing with a variety of subjects touching their lives.

The official language in Senegal is French, which is a relic of the country's colonial past. It is the language of instruction despite being inaccessible to a majority of Senegalese. Alongside it, local languages are elective subjects for college students, are used as a medium of communication, and for other purposes in non-formal educational settings. ‘Ajamī writing is nevertheless widely used in Senegal in its Wolof form known as Wolofal, especially among followers of the Murīdiyya Sufi order, founded by Shaykh Amadu Bamba (1853–1927). The most prolific ‘Ajamī poets of this brotherhood are Sëriñ Moor Kayre (1874–1951), Sëriñ Sàmba Jaara Mbay (1870–1971), Sëriñ Muusaa Ka (1883–1967), and Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate (1875–1954). This group of ‘Ajamī poets were dubbed by some authors the ‘Pléiade mouride’, in reference to the group of sixteenth-century French Renaissance poets.

This chapter examines the poetic work of a leading Mouride scholar, Sëriñ Moor Kayre, whose work caught my attention. With the exception of his close followers and specialists of Wolof ‘Ajamī, his work is unknown to the general public.

The study of his manuscripts is premised on the alarm sounded by Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop in Nations nègres et culture regarding the urgency of preserving Africa's rich intellectual leagacy, especially its written literary sources. Diop emphasized particularly the national prominence of these four great scholars and Wolofal poets. In his view, the poetic legacy of Sëriñ Moor Kayre and his peers ‘should be carefully guarded before it disappears’.

This essay unpacks the strategic role of race in Titus Andronicus and brings to light the play’s earnest representation of racism’s entanglement in the demands of the global capitalist project born in Shakespeare’s time. Titus Andronicus dreams of London as a cosmopolitan capital with imperial aspirations in a proto-colonial world-economy. In the possible futures that the play dreams up for England, prescribing the most profitable forms of intercultural trafficking is a priority. The smart device used for establishing such prescriptions is called race. The racial regime ushered in by early modern globalization, triggered by colonization, and forged in the furnace of early capitalism, was predicated not upon the elimination of racialized others, but on their strategic and contingent inclusion at inferior ranks in a hierarchical multicultural society. Titus Andronicus dramatizes the push and pull between the exclusion and inclusion of racialized Others necessary to the growth of early modern world-economies.