It is tempting to dismiss the littérature-monde manifesto as a last gasp of la Francophonie, a French refusal to accept cultural and colonial decline, or the dying embers of a lost rivalry with the Anglo-Saxon world. But littérature-monde, especially when we stand in a globalised culture, can also remind us of our lack of universality: our most capacious words – words like ‘world’ – are in fact of limited and relative scope. In the Anglo-American world, employing the term littérature-monde, a phrase synonymous with but qualitatively different from its English equivalent, supports David Damrosch's assertion that ‘World Literature’ cannot be the ‘plenum of all literature’ (Damrosch 2003: 4). Instead, thinking through the concept of littérature-monde sends us in the direction of Damrosch's own definition of World Literature, in which totality is replaced by encounter and circulation: World Literature would consist of ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin in Europe)’ (5). World Literature would be an encounter between one culture and another, between a reader and a book from elsewhere, frequently requiring the mediation of translation and the invention of new forms, without exhaustion of possibilities. Littérature-monde would remind us that there are many paths toward other worlds.

To consider cinéma-monde as another form of circulation, happening in a space between cultures, challenges us to rethink the relation between dominant and emerging cinemas. With good reason, theorists of world cinema have often been concerned with the cultural and economic dominance of Western cinema: cinéma-monde should lead us inevitably to discussions of French colonisation and its afterlives. But to look at cinéma-monde as an encounter also allows us to appreciate, as Dudley Andrew (2004) argues, how the stylistics of Western cinemas have been adapted and repurposed around the world, similar to how techniques of the novel have travelled around the earth. The cinemas of former colonies should not be thought of as simple derivations or as extensions of French cinema's reach into the world, in a way that evokes a narrow definition of la Francophonie. If the origin of cinéma-monde is in the encounter, and distinct from technology and artistic technique, then cinéma-monde will give rise to new forms more oriented to how we intersect with the film as viewers.