Writing the Slave Trade Trauma in Francophone Africa

This book examines the narrative and aesthetic strategies through which three contemporary Francophone African novelists — Togolese Kangni Alem (Esclaves, 2009), Cameroonian Léonora Miano (La Saison de l’ombre, 2013), and Congolese Wilfried N’Sondé (Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents, 2018) — engage the traumatic legacies of the transatlantic slave trade from the African shore, departing from the diasporic perspectives that have dominated the field. It argues that these works reconstruct the slave trade through what it theorises as traumatomimesis and historiopoesis, aesthetic practices in which narrative fragmentation, polyphonic mourning, and imaginative engagement with archival silences enact the work of a collective trauma that conventional historiography cannot contain. Organising its analysis around the moralities of capture, the spatiality of the trade, and the corporeality of violence, the study shows how Miano’s grieving Mulongo women, Alem’s rehabilitated abolitionist king, and N’Sondé’s silenced Kongolese priest each embody a distinct dimension of what the slave trade destroyed, and how their shared refusal of narrative resolution constitutes a sustained act of mourning and a foundation for African renaissance. Die Dissertation entstand an der BIGSAS (Universität Bayreuth) im Rahmen des DFG-geförderten Exzellenzclusters ‚Africa Multiple‘ (EXC 2052/1 – 390713894).