The Noir Atlantic by Higginson, Pim;

Short description:

The Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on francophone African crime fiction.

Long description:

The Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Himes emigrated to Paris; he struggled there, just as he had in the United States. In 1957, his luck changed: the famous French Série noire brought out the first installment of his “Harlem” crime series, La reine des pommes. Suddenly, he was a household name in France. Later, he would also have a significant influence on Francophone African writers; for them, Himes’s blend of absurdist humor and violence offered an alternative to a high literary paradigm implanted during the colonial era. Likewise, his heterogeneous identity as American, black, and a writer of “French” bestsellers modeled an escape from the centripetal pull of the Métropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione’s depictions of Senegal’s marijuana-smoking subculture in La Vie en spirale (1982) and ending with Mongo Beti’s 2001 Branle-bas en noir et blanc, set in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Francophone African crime fiction rejected French criteria of literary success; it embraced a new postcolonial aesthetic that emphasized entertaining the reader while making a living. The Noir Atlantic demonstrates why turning to what this study calls a “frivolous literary” mode represented a profound shift in perspective that anticipated more recent developments such as littérature monde.

The Noir Atlantic is a captivating book in which Pim Higginson carves out new terrain through absorbing readings of the under-explored corpus of francophone African crime writing. Readers will be stimulated by the numerous insights provided into the multi-directional nature of cultural and political networks that have historically shaped relations between Africa, Europe, and the United States, and appreciate the far-reaching implications for diaspora, francophone, and postcolonial studies.

Dominic Thomas

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: The Frivolous Literary


• 1. "Pas de litterature": Abasse Ndione and the Rise of Crime


• 2. Minor Mistranslations: Simon Njami and the Making of a Parisianist Himes


• 3. Crime Pays: Achille Ngoye and the Serie noire


• 4. Ethnographic Erotics: Bolya and the Writing of the Other


• 5. Terreur Rose: Kouty, memoire de sang and the Gendering of Noir


• 6. Going out Blazing: Mongo Beti's Last Two Novels


• Bibliography


• Index