Brazil-A New Republic of African Letters?

Today, it is not the former colonial metropolis (Portugal), but a former colony (Brazil) that
has become the main legitimizing center of African literature in the Portuguese language.
It is also in Brazil that the largest number of studies on African literature written in other
languages is produced. To illustrate this state of affairs, we begin by demonstrating how
the work of Alain Mabanckou has penetrated the literary market and the Brazilian
academy. After contextualizing the historical institutional dependence that characterizes
French-speaking African literature in relation to the “center” (Paris) and situating
Mabanckou in this dynamic, we look at how his work arrived in Brazil, the growing
interest that it has awakened, and the type of studies conducted there. In the last part of
the article, we show that Mabanckou is not an isolated phenomenon and is part of a
historical process that began more than fifty years ago: due to the flow of translations and
academic studies on works from different linguistic contexts, Brazil helps to unsettle the
linguistic self-centeredness that characterizes African literary studies and reduces dis-
tances between “center” and “periphery” that guide the world literary game.