D/Ecrire une ville: géocritique de Nouméa à partir de brèches romanesques

Abstract

This article explores the way literature informs and is informed by the perception of urban postcolonial space. Chroniques De La Mauvaise Herbe, the first novel of Vincent Vuibert (2013), marks a new threshold in the Francophone oceanian literary field, at first by the influences claimed by the author and then by the representation renewed of Noumea. Among these influences is the contemporary U.S. thriller in which Vuibert renews an aesthetics of the marginality to stack them in the colonial and postcolonial segmentarities. His characters seem to evolve along borders established from regimes of political, historic and economic powers, which they undergo or also try to thwart. On the other hand, this novel joins in a discursive tradition centred on the city inaugurated by the first Kanak political militancy of the 1970s and which was strengthened in the literary field with the signature of the political agreements of 1988 and 1998. It is a question here of showing how the novel draws routes in Noumea who are so many ways to describe oppositions and encounters.