The ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’ manifesto appeared in Le Monde in March 2007 only months before a group of authors mainly born of immigrant parents released their own literary manifesto, ‘Qui fait la France?’, to Les Inrockuptibles and Le Nouvel Observateur. Given the temporal proximity of these two manifestos, it is hard not to ask how their projects might compare, especially since both declarations are of considerable pertinence to debates on postcolonial authorship. In much the same vocabulary, both groups of authors – the first led by Michel Le Bris and the second by Mohamed Razane – issue a challenge to the concentration of political and publishing capital around Paris, and ultimately the social and literary reproduction that locks people and texts into categories of the past. But, whereas Le Bris's group framed its declaration with respect to the literary prize season of 2006 that attributed five of France's most prestigious literary awards to authors of non-French origin (two of whom signed the manifesto), the manifesto crafted by the Collectif Qui fait la France? was triggered in many ways by the riots of 2005 and the long-standing marginalization suffered by authors from within France's banlieues défavorisées. The dissimilar moments by which the two manifestos are framed point to the fact that the signatories initiated their literary movements from decidedly different locations and situations.