Transfers of Knowledge, Multiple Identities. The Example of Students from the FEANF (Fédération Des Étudiants d'Afrique Noire En France)

This article focuses on the transfer of academic and activist knowledge, involved in the French colonisation of Sub-Saharan Africa. It examines how African students, coming to study in French universities managed to use the colonising culture against colonisation. It mainly concentrates on how members of the executive committee of the Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF), predominantly male but also female, have been able to negotiate their bi-culturalism, by inventing and analysing in their writings a new cosmopolitanism that is also a form of 'métissage' or hybridisation. These students who sometimes pursued brilliant careers in their home countries succeeded in transforming colonial domination into a chance and a new way of being in the world. Thus, they opened the way for contemporary African intellectuals to travel between countries and languages, to reinvent through the 'littérature-monde' an inherently revolutionary cosmopolitanism.