| Institutionalized postcolonialism broadly located its study of the dispersal of Africans in the circum-Atlantic space and the diffraction of their identities within the postmodernist frame of reference. Caused by the slavery-colonization continuum that was legitimized with the regulatory ideals of Enlightenment-based modernity, this Afro-Atlantic dissemination undoubtedly puts modernity on trial, inducing its legitimization crisis. However, Afro-Atlantic criticism, especially as articulated in major reflexive writings of the Francophone world by Edouard Glissant, Georges Ngal, Werewere Liking and Patrick Chamoiseau, only deconstructs modernity in to search for new foundations of legitimacy endowed with effectively global validity, including for those cultures and societies that were most radically disenfranchised in first modernity. Such reconstruction of legitimacy is based on inclusive distinction: on the ruins of exclusive, monoterritorial nation-state modernity, rises a new, cosmopolitan modernity that is reinforced in all corners of the world by the dynamics of globalization. Similar to those of peoples of African descent, the identities, societies and poles of allegiance of all peoples are increasingly cumulative, both dispersed and immersed in numerous multilingual, multinational, multicultural and multiracial territorialities; thus connected to all others, they are represented and in diverse ways governed in and by the whole world.;Reflections on the resulting social and cultural heterogeneity are at the core of Francophone African and Caribbean writing which first deplored such heterogeneity in terms of disempowering uprootedness and hybridity. In its reflexive turn however, francophone writing embraces the very dissemination it results from and, in a formidable cosmopolitan assumption, valorizes it as exemplary in the contemporary and future global condition. Writing becomes a cosmopolitan aesthetics that seeks to be legitimized as such. Putting all languages and cultures in dialogue produces new forms that transcend monolithic, hegemonic and homogenizing classifications which, by exclusive distinction, prescribe to subsume a whole into one of its components which, like the novel in obsolescent modernity, ipso facto and illegitimately becomes dominant. The multiple generic configurations of works deriving from global dialogism is emblematic of resources needed for the development of cosmopolitan vision and legitimization that will allow appropriate understanding and action on the dynamics of globalized modernity. |
