Smith, Macs; (2025) Anti-Parasitic Urbanism in Francophone African Fiction: Sow Fall and Boudjedra. French Studies , 79 (3) pp. 439-456. 10.3828/fs.2025.79.3.6.

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Abstract

The protagonists of Aminata Sow Fall’s La Grève des bàttu (1979) and Rachid Boudjedra’s L’Escargot entêté (1977) are public health officials leading ‘campagnes d’assainissement’ in francophone African cities. They are charged with removing a supposed public health threat from urban space: beggars in the former text and rats in the latter. This article reads the novels alongside Michel Serres’s Le Parasite. It argues that thinking about the sanitation campaigns as part of a more fundamental project to eliminate what the protagonists see as parasites from their cities makes sense of the intersections between hospitality, socio-politics, hygiene, and communication in both texts. Consistent with Serres’s understanding of parasites as intrinsic to systems, the novels depict efforts to eliminate them as doomed to failure, and in the process call into question the violence visited upon those treated as the unwelcome guests of the city. This violence is shown to be linked to French colonialism in the Maghreb and West Africa. Noting the narrator of L’Escargot entêté’s efforts to escape European epistemes in his theorization of the city, the article puts Serres in dialogue with theorists of subaltern urbanism.

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