This chapter addresses how African literature has been instituted as an internationally recognized category of its own. It considers the case of writers from Francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1960s onward. The chapter also considers Francophone African writing as a relatively autonomous universe, with its own narratives, institutions, and events, despite its historical relationship to other kinds of literature. Book markets exist on a national scale, in African countries, in France, but also on an international scale, through translations or through the Francophone book trade. This hierarchized market comprises African countries, but also Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, and it changes constantly. The number of new female writers has increased steadily from the 1980s onward. As a result, if the writers under scrutiny are dominated in the world literary space, their social, cultural, and linguistic resources make them dominants among the dominated. They are, in short, located in a semi-periphery of the world literary space.

Focusing on the satirical stories that the protagonist in Admiring Silence produces, this paper investigates their function as strategies within a submerged history of migration and global movement. I argue that the stories of failed integration and a discredited historical past, when placed within a historical context of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, can be studied as part of the shortcoming of both a Eurocentric and an Afro-centric historiography in relation to societies of the Indian Ocean rim. The protagonist's entanglement in his own stories and his ability to move between the positions of perpetrator and victim as well as between that of the traveller and the one left behind are placed within a context of assimilation and hierarchies of dependence of Indian Ocean societies. In calling our attention to this submerged history, the novel challenges historicist understandings of change and movement and points to the global histories involved in the process of articulating modernity.

This essay studies how literary representations of the historical links between Asia and South Africa created through Indian Ocean slavery are produced through the use of the colonial archive in fiction as a way of positioning and expressing the author as descendant, both in a literal sense and in the figurative meaning as inheritor of the legacy of slavery. I focus primarily on The Slave Book (1998) by Rayda Jacobs and briefly look at how the theme of ancestry is approached in two very different later novels, Kites of Good Fortune (2004) by Therese Benade and Unconfessed (2006) by Yvette Christianse. I argue that in their search for the figure of the slave, the authors both challenge and utilize ideas of the archive as a site of the original and the real as well as perceived notions of family and ancestry. The approach taken in this article follows work by Gabeba Baderoon, Meg Samuelson, and Pumla Gqola on slavery in South African literature, Isabel Hofmeyr on Oceanic paradigms, and Ann Laura Stoler on the function of the archive. I place the texts within a context of historical studies of Cape slavery and find that they are formed by the intellectual traditions of the Indian Ocean World as well as the generative function of the colonial archive.