"Reconfigurations littéraires de l’espace urbain colonial et postcolonial"
Résumé
This paper aims at examining the terms of standardizing physical space and its social uses, as well as those of shaping the world by European cartography and urban planning in a colonial context. As a metaphor of European power, the colonial city symbolizes modernity overwhelming tradition and supposedly wild nature. However, the segregation devices set up by colonization produce murky areas where surreptitious or illicit encounters could take place. During the postcolonial era, the racial and social parting of colonial city tends to unravel to the point of dismissing the centre-periphery opposition and the various forms of cadastral surveying. Urban space then becomes a place of negotiations and transactions. Relying on a corpus of novels, the paper proposes to study the literary configuration of colonial and postcolonial cities as much as it produces meeting spaces, ecotones, between non-places and hyper-places, while being part of an intensely relational space within globalisation.