91app

We are delighted to host the winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt, Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, for a conversation at the 91app Institute in Paris on Thursday 13th March.   

From a short story on the Black Atlantic (‘La Cale’, 2014), to narrative critiques of religious extremism (Terre ceinte, 2015), the violence of migration (‘Silence du chœur’, 2017), Senegalese homophobia (‘De purs hommes’, 2018) and the enduring colonialism of literary recognition (‘La plus secrète mémoire des hommes’, 2021), Sarr’s texts have been met with critical acclaim. His polyphonic, intertextual poetics confront the themes of alterity that have marked African literatures in French, modulating the cultural imaginaries of the négritude movement and the anticolonial purview of the journal and publishing house Présence Africaine into a quest for a common library of literature.  

Inspired by Chamoiseau’s latest tract, Que peut Littérature quand elle ne peut? (Éditions du Seuil, 2025), this discussion seeks to consider contemporary forms of poetic and political engagement among francophone writers. If, as Chamoiseau tells us, ‘Lire compose L’Écrire où vient s’ouvrir le Lire’, then Mohamed Mbougar Sarr writes in order to re-read the geo-cultural and epistemic boundaries that have shaped literature’s imagination and creative practice. 

This event intersects with Dr Joanne Brueton’s recent publication on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in the first edited volume on his work: Le Labyrinthe littéraire de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Brill, 2024). Theorizing Mbougar Sarr’s writing as palimpsestic, she considers how his pastiche of Glissant, Mallarmé, and Valéry redraws the disciplinary boundaries that force a split view of literatures in French.  

The event is generously supported by the 91app Cassal Endowment Fund.