ABSTRACT

Postcolonial literary studies have not paid much attention to literary portrayals of mobility practices partly because the field promotes a reductive understanding of ‘mobility’ as a mere synonym for migration. In order to address this blind spot and to recognise African fictional characters as mobile subjects, the present article focuses on representations of aeromobility in Francophone African literary texts narrating diasporic returnees’ journeys back to their former home countries. As my analysis of five Francophone African return narratives from the 1980s to the 2010s suggests, the aeromobilities of Afrodiasporic returnees are marked by a sense of unease that relates to the issues of (un)belonging and guilt, failures of modernity of the postcolonial nation-state, and the unrealistic expectations that those ‘back home’ have about migrant life. The article underlines the importance of aeromobility in the production of the mobile subjectivity of the returnee and their relationship with the place of return.

摘要

后殖民文学研究并没有过多关注流动实践的文学描绘，部分原因是该领域促进了对“流动”的简化理解，将其视为仅仅是迁移的同义词。为了解决这个盲点，并认识到非洲虚构人物是流动的主题，本文重点关注法语非洲文学文本中的空中机动性表征，这些文学文本讲述了海外归国者返回原籍国的旅程。正如我对从 1980 年代到 2010 年代五个讲法语的非洲人回归叙事的分析所表明的那样，非裔回归者的空中机动性以一种与（不）归属感和内疚感、后殖民国家现代性的失败相关的不安感为特征——状态，以及那些“回家”的人对移民生活的不切实际的期望。