Amin Maalouf’s Leo The African : Between Self-Orientalism and Reconstructing Identity

Abstract

This paper explores the fictional world of Amin Maalouf both as a manifestation of World Literature in French, and as an exceptionnal diasporic voice, while problematizing Maalouf’s positionality as an exophonic writer grappling with issues of language, exile, and identity. It further questions Maalouf’s engagement with the essentialist Logic characteristic of self-Orientalist/exoticist rhetoric, and thus speculates on his involvement -by accident or by design-with the machinery of the global capitalist marketplace and the publishing industry. The paper incidentally invites the reader to envisage Maalouf’s literary opus Leo The African (1986) as a market commodity making its way through the international circuits of book trade dissemination, and to further examine the discursive strategies mobilized by both author and publisher to promote the circulation of Maalouf’s text on a planetary scale.