The Noir Atlantic Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel

Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Chester Himes emigrated to Paris where he struggled to publish, just as he had in the United States, until the "Harlem Domestic Series" transformed the author into a cult figure for a generation of Parisian readers who appreciated the blend of absurdist humor and violence. For African authors, these novels also modeled an escape from a high literary paradigm inherited from the colonial experience. Himes's ambiguous role as a famous "French" writer paradoxically also made him an effective means of escaping the centripetal pull of the M_tropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione's 1982 La Vie en spirale depictions of Senegal's marijuana smoking subculture and ending with Mongo Beti's 2001 Branles-bas en noir et blanc that displaced Himes' Harlem to Yaound_, Cameroon, these works turned their backs on France and its ideological and anthropological criteria of literary success and embraced a new aesthetic. In the process, the Francophone African authors of noir became less motivated by Fanonian cultural nationalism and more with entertaining the reader while making a living. Noir Atlantic demonstrates why and how we should consider this move to a "frivolous literary" as a profoundly significant moment in Francophone African literary history that lead the way to more recent developments such as Litt_rature Monde.

Pim Higginson is Associate Professor of French at the Department of French and Francophone Studies, Bryn Mawr College, USA.