Francophone manifestos: on solidarity in the French-speaking world

This contribution considers the publication of the 'Manifeste de quarante-quatre ecrivains pour une langue francaise "liberee de son pacte exclusif avec la nation"' (Barbery et al. 2007) as a manifestary phenomenon. As such, it is part of a history of French-language manifestos that have been instrumental in expressing and enacting solidarity and solidary resistance to marginalization within the Francophone/French world binary. Using Marxian and postcolonial theories as well as theories of affect, this article studies solidarity as it is articulated in manifestos such as Aime Cesaire's (1942) 'En guise de manifeste litteraire'; Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant's (1993) Eloge de la Creolite; Jacques Stephen Alexis's (1946) `Lettre aux Hommes Vieux'; the conclusion of Frantz Fanon's (2002) Les damnes de la terre, the 'Manifeste du FLQ'; Michele Lalonde and Denis Moniere's (1981) Cause commune: Manifeste pour une internationale des petites cultures, of course the 'Manifeste pour une litterature-monde' (Barbery et al. 2007), and Ernest Breleur et al.'s February 2009 'Manifeste pour les "produits" de haute necessite'. Ultimately, the article reflects on the nature of the manifesto as a dual form both literary and political and on the insights that manifestary solidarity may provide in restructuring the binaries of francophonie versus France, periphery versus centre, politics versus art, and artist versus critic.