Ethics of resistance and fictional minds in Léonora Miano’s L’intérieur de la nuit and La saison de l’ombre

Abstract

Leonora Miano is one of the most influential francophone writers. If her early novels set in Africa gave her a status of global fame, Miano’s Afropean literature has also received more visibility in the academic world because her writing displays a genuine cultural hybridity and cordiality. This article explores the ethical motivation of forgetting and remembering in the history of Africans’ experiences of suffering and death. It specifically highlights the relationship between the concepts of resistance, morality and freedom as engines of social change in L’interieur de la nuit in 2005 and La saison de l’ombre in 2013. Besides her Afropean themes, the ethical function and emotional content of Miano’s artistic forms on Africa are not simply a fertile ground for testing useful answers of African contemporary social and political challenges, but also a lieu de memoire