Université de Strasbourg

Anthony Mangeon

Biography

Centre for Representations Studies: Ideas, Aesthetics and Literature in the 19th and 20th Centuries (CERIEL), Literary Configurations, University of Strasbourg

Anthony Mangeon, USIAS Fellow 2017

Anthony Mangeon is Professor of Francophone Literature at the University of Strasbourg, after having lectured at the University of Stanford (California, US) and, in France, at Cergy-Pontoise University (Paris) and the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) where he obtained a doctorate in Modern Literature and a Master’s degree in anthropology. He has published and edited several volumes on African, West Indian and black American literature and their relationships to knowledge; including Crimes d’auteur (2016), L’Empire de la littérature (2016), Anthropolitiques (2015), Postures postcoloniales (2012) and La Pensée noire et l’Occident (2010) that was awarded the 2011 Louis-Marin Prize by the Academy of Overseas Sciences (Paris). Furthermore, Anthony Mangeon is a Foreign Member of the  l’Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences (Brussels) and member of the class of human sciences.

His current research focuses on “thinking fiction”, or the different ways to critically reflect via fiction. The aim of his USIAS project is to show and analyze the ways in which different African futures have been imagined since the 19th century and have generated a way of thought that can be found today in a number of economic and geo-political studies as well as in prospective reports. It will also, conversely, show how the social sciences and humanities (history, economics, anthropology and sociology) have fed into contemporary fiction, especially fiction of a speculative or counterfactual nature sketching alternative African futures.

The Fifth Rencontres des Études Africaines en France has taken place in Marseille on 9-12 July 2018. Supported by the par the GIS Afrique, featuring a panel on the African Futures co-organized by Anthony Mangeon. 

Anthony Mangeon has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in the autumn semester (16 August -16 December 2018) as part of his work on his USIAS research project. 

Project - Narrating African Futures

September 2017 - August 2019

The current demographic and economic growth in many African countries is spectacular, as the continent will soon host 25% of the working-age world population. The question of “African futures” is therefore of major geopolitical and economical stake and is consequently at the centre of a wide range of discourses. Economists, historians, philosophers, novelists and artists have developed innovative ways of imagining, staging and narrating African futures, which result in as many utopias as dystopias, depending on whether Afro-optimistic or Afro-pessimistic views prevail. Thus, very different discourses often share similar literary images, figures of speech and modes of arguing or of narrating, which rhetorical or narratological analyses could usefully bring to light so as to emphasise their common assumptions, ways of thinking and imagining. This research project therefore aims to explore the many overlaps between economics and literature, prospective studies and fictions, as well as counterfactual history and novels on the topic of African futures.

Links

France 2030