Mobility, Globalisation and Labour in Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique.

Globalisation is marked by the increase of mobility (Appadurai 1996). Mobility’s diverse manifestations have also become key components of contemporary African literatures, where national and continental borders are transgressed as much by the fictional characters as the authors themselves. While fictional African mobile subjects are often conceived in a rather vague manner as migrants, elements such as labour and professional identity play an important role in how their mobilities are defined and represented.

This paper explores the ways in which the diasporic African authors Alain Mabanckou and Fatou Diome address the question of globalisation and labour in their novels set in different contexts of Afroeuropean mobility. The central characters’ professional lives in Europe or their aspirations of having one are important not only in the sense that they drive the plot, but also because labour is a theme that enables the authors to explore and criticise the logic of globalisation from an African perspective. The protagonist of Tais-toi et meurs (2012) is an undocumented Congolese migrant who ends up being part of the diasporic Congolese underworld in Paris. In Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), a young man living on a Senegalese island nurtures naive hopes of a career as a professional soccer player in Europe. Both texts can be read as critiques of the exploitative features of globalisation that profit from underprivileged Africans’ “desire for Europe”.