In post-war France, literary representations of sub-Saharan Africa were written and read in response to political, aesthetic, and commercial imperatives. A greater number of these representations appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s from a flourishing African literary scene which built consciously on the achievements of black writers in France during the inter-war years and as French publishers responded to growing – if still very limited – interest among metropolitan readers. The literary field of this period was gradually reconfigured by decolonization and its destabilizing effect on ideas of literary value and authority and their, often unconscious, attachment to the French national imaginary. This is seen in the degree of meaning attached to African authorship by readers, attitudes towards the French language, and editorial mediations of literary style. Whether explicitly engaged with the complex political realities of decolonization, affirming black cultural identities, or reproducing colonial stereotypes of exotic difference, decisions were made regarding the form, content, and material production of a very wide range of texts. What emerges is a complex portrait of the French-language publishing scene during the so-called vingt glorieuses; a portrait which highlights the fragility and limits of universalism as a framework for literary evaluation at a time of world historical change.

This study has attended to moments when debates about literature were shaped by social pressures and projected political change, via the material circumstances of literary production. The épuration trials of the late 1940s, for example, saw prominent writers and publishers convicted of collaboration, creating space to devolve traditional authority over literary production to new journals and éditeurs engagés such as Présence Africaine and Éditions de Minuit. As Gisèle Sapiro (2011b) has shown, these legal cases raised questions regarding the responsibility of the writer and publisher in society. What moral duty did the act of writing entail? How could autonomy (from political and economic forces) be reconciled with responsibility? Was that responsibility collective or individual, and what potential for freedom did it allow? Following the occupation, the notion of responsibility generally operated with reference to a national (metropolitan) French framework (Sapiro, 2011b: 675, 691), though it resonated with the ideas of many ‘overseas’ writers. In the following decade, technological advances in the production of printed material – for example, the introduction of cheap paperbacks, began to democratize readership and unsettle divisions between high and low literary production.